Nymble
A turn-based puzzle platformer
Designed and built end-to-end, on my own, from concept to production.
Embedded Files
This is the trailer for Nymble 2 (the sequel), planned for iOS, Mac, and PC release in 2027.
Nymble is a web and native mobile game I built and evolved over multiple years as a solo developer, combining UX design, game development, and orchestral music composition.
It started as a way to showcase my music skills in an interactive format, but gradually became a full end-to-end playable product spanning all of these disciplines:
UX Research, Game Design, Game Dev, Pixel Art, Music Composition, Music Production, Animaion, Analytics, Social Media
Over time, it gained organic traction, including discovery on Newgrounds and unsolicited player gameplay recordings, which became a core source of real-world UX feedback.
How it all started
How it all started
A snippet of the opening of Overture from Nymble 2.
I’ve always wanted to compose music for games — not beats or background loops, but full orchestral scores shaped by pacing, tension, and emotion. As a classically trained composer, I use harmony, texture, and timbre to express ideas that visuals alone can’t.
Most full-time game composers find work through industry connections. However, my primary career is UX, so I don’t have that kind of network (nor the time to build one).
Music is also difficult to showcase: it’s non-visual, time-based, and needs several minutes to make an impression. It simply cannot compete with visual art on social media, which takes milliseconds to consume.
So in the end, I decided to build my own game — giving my music a visual vehicle and presenting it in a way that resonates better with game developers.
Nymble 1 — learning by building
Nymble 1 — learning by building
In 2018, I took it upon myself to learn game programming. After some research, I chose GameMaker Studio, since its proprietary language GML was based on C and Javascript, which I was already familiar with.
After some brainstorming, I finally arrived at an idea for a turn-based puzzle platformer with a twist—what if you could jump?
I chose a puzzle platformer because it was manageable for a solo project, but still flexible enough to support a range of environments and pacing. That gave me room to write and showcase a wide variety of musical styles.
An early state machine I used to map out the player object's states.
At first, the code was messy, but that was the point — I was learning how game systems actually work in practice. The biggest shift was understanding the game loop: games don’t behave like web apps. Everything runs continuously, frame by frame, which changes how you think about state, flow, and inter-connected systems.
At this stage, I was experimenting constantly with mechanics, controls, animation, and the audio pipeline.
Within a week or two, I was programming fairly comfortably in GML.
Nymble 1.1 — rebuilding with intent
Nymble 1.1 — rebuilding with intent
After learning the fundamentals, I rebuilt the project into Nymble 1.1 in early 2019 — this time with a clear platform strategy.
The web demo was still the primary entry point: instant access, no install, maximum reach. That meant the web build couldn’t feel like a prototype. It had to perform well and make a strong first impression.
So the rebuild focused on:
keeping performance tight in the browser
minimizing input lag and frame drops
maintaining enough polish to reflect the intended mobile experience
This directly shaped the architecture — simpler, more efficient systems, designed to hold up under real-world conditions.
Organic traction & real player feedback
Organic traction & real player feedback
Through this journey, something unexpected happened: players found and shared the game organically. This wasn’t driven by marketing — it was discovery-based. The game was featured on Newgrounds, and received recognition within that community.
That turned Nymble into something more than a vehicle for my music.
I treated this as real research data:
where players hesitated
what they ignored
what they enjoyed unexpectedly
how they interpreted UI and pacing
This feedback loop directly influenced iteration decisions.
At one point, I also had direct communication with Tom Fulp, founder of Newgrounds, who engaged with the project and provided feedback when I explored distribution options outside the platform.
FutureCopLGF played Nymble 2 on Newgrounds and flagged a frustrating level. It revealed that enemy movement and environmental changes weren’t intuitive, so I simplified the setup for better predictability.
Vacation sprint development
Vacation sprint development
While building Nymble, I was working full-time in UX design, so development happened in focused two-week sprints during vacation periods.
That rhythm forced discipline:
clear scope
realistic goals
meaningful iteration per cycle
It also created distance, which helped me re-evaluate decisions objectively between builds.
Nymble 1.1 marked the first production-ready release in 2020, including deployment to the App Store. This required navigating platform guidelines, review processes, and compliance constraints — shifting the project from a personal build to a shipped product.
Finally, in December 2020, I launched Nymble for iOS. It was quite a milestone for me to have my music featured in a commercial product, what I have been working towards all these years.
However, the game didn't achieve commercial success, due to lack of time and energy to market the game, as I was working in UX full-time at the time. I took a break from Nymble for a while, returning to it a few years later. I wanted to give myself a second chance to do things right, applying everything I learned from the first experience.
Nymble 2 — product thinking and refinement
Nymble 2 — product thinking and refinement
By the time I started Nymble 2, the GameMaker engine had evolved significantly, providing more efficient ways to code things. So instead of extending the inefficient code, I made the difficult decision to start from scratch using the latest engine.
This phase was heavily influenced by my UX career and experience working with Product Managers — especially around prioritization, trade-offs, and go-to-market strategy.
In 2026, my work situation changed, and I was able to work on Nymble 2 full time while planning my next career move. It was during this period that I decided to release the game on Steam based on analytics and player feedback.
And this is where Nymble is at today...
What I learned
What I learned
Even after spending hundreds of hours building a fully playable game to showcase my music in context, I realized execution alone doesn’t guarantee attention or evaluation from the industry.
Making a game is only 10% of the effort — the rest is getting it in front of players. Which is why, with Nymble 2, I’ve started treating product strategy and marketing as part of the design process, not an afterthought.
Final takeaway
Final takeaway
I didn’t start Nymble to become a game developer. I started it because I needed a way to prove my music composition abilities. And in the process, I ended up building something else: a full-cycle product that combines UX design, game systems, and orchestral composition — bringing all my core interests into one place.
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