Shelf Snap
Stage 1/10
Pushed 0/8
HP 5
Score 0
Books are sliding off the shelves one by one — tap each protruding book to push it back before it falls to the floor. Every book that drops costs you one HP. As stages advance, books slide out faster and more pop out simultaneously, splitting your attention across two shelves at once.
You start with 5 HP and must push a set number of books back per stage to advance. Stage 10 is a frantic blur of color as five books can protrude at once.
Shelf Snap is a reflex management game set in a chaotic library. The visual design — wooden shelves, colorful book spines, paper page edges — gives it a warmth that contrasts with the escalating panic of later stages. The core tension is attention splitting: when multiple books protrude at once, which one are you ignoring?
We wanted a game where the urgency was visible rather than abstract. A book sliding off a shelf has a natural, physical danger — you can see it getting worse with each frame. The wobble animation as books near their fall point acts as a warning signal without needing a separate UI element. The library setting was chosen because it's universally familiar and creates an immediate emotional investment in keeping things tidy.
Each book has a protrusion value that increases every frame by the current stage's pop speed. When protrusion reaches the maximum threshold, the book falls and HP is deducted. Tapping a book sets it to "pushing" state, which rapidly returns its protrusion to zero at 4.5× the pop speed. Up to five books can be active simultaneously in the final stage. A spawn timer controls how often a new random idle book becomes active, shortening with each stage.