After I sent Jason my initial sketches, he spent about 10 hours cooking up a Flash game PoC* based on the idea:

The colors are simple, there’s no background art, and you had to move around with arrow keys on the computer. But most of the basic gameplay in the Flash game is exactly the same as the final version of Crazy Shapes on iPhone and iPad: four different piece types, push the pieces into their targets, and pieces bounce off the walls or each other.

We considered (and nixed) gameplay features like rotations, flips, and deforming shapes. It seemed hard and complicated, and what we already had was so simple and fun—even though the physics were messed up, collisions were worse, and detecting whether you’d actually hit your target was tricky. We eventually went with making shapes and targets the same size and basing scoring on center-to-center proximity.

“My high score is 883,420!” said Jason.

Already, the game could hook someone in for 10 minutes and more of serious attention with just a simple concept. This was something to keep pursuing …

UP NEXT: Crazy Shapes, the Robot Flash Animation!

* “proof of concept.” I mention, because I had never heard the term before.