Nurbits A Neuroscience Music Puzzle Game
“Every chip is a neuron. Get them all firing on the beat.”
Click to playNurbits is a music puzzle game about how neurons talk to each other. You are wiring up a robot band, and every chip on the board behaves like a neuron: it has a firing threshold, it sums the signal arriving from the chips wired into it, and when that sum crosses the threshold it fires. Excitatory chips add signal. Inhibitory chips subtract it. Relays pass it on. One stimulus chip starts the signal, and you need to route the signal through to all the correct chips. Note chips play a note when they fire, so a solved puzzle is a piece of the band’s song.
I built systems, tools and the asset pipeline on it at Cogent Education (IS3D) in Athens, Georgia, from 2013 until it shipped on Steam, itch.io and classroom tablets in July 2017.
What is playable here
This is a recreation of one level, not the original game. Press play and you get loop AZ2 of the song Holo-Horizon — the square-wave synth part, in tutorial mode, 16 columns by 8 rows at 230 BPM in C major. One of the fifty-odd puzzles in the shipped game.
It is a rebuild in Rust and Bevy, compiled to WebAssembly, written against the original Unity project’s own C# rather than from memory. It restores much of my own work on the core mechanics that drive the puzzle system, and on the audio timing and sample generation.
The original assets, art, music and the name belong to their original creators and rights holders. This is a personal technical and archival exercise by someone who worked on it, not a release.
If you get stuck, restart puts the level back exactly as it starts: everything you placed comes off the board and the tray refills.
Where it came from
Nurbits was built on NIH Small Business Innovation Research grants R43/R44 OD010798, “Nurbits: Playing for Success in Neuroscience”, administered by the NIH Office of the Director. The game released on Steam on 17 July 2017 and is still on sale there.
The credits, taken straight from the game’s own credits screen:
Development Team — Stephen Borden, Jef Freydl, Brian Ruggieri, Dominique Edwards, Scott Malo
Music — Mike Albanese, Jace Bartet, JoJo Glidewell, Terence Chiyezhan
Executive Producers — Tom Robertson, Georgia Hodges, Casey O’Donnell
What it does
A chip fires when the signal wired into it reaches its threshold. Excitatory chips add, inhibitory chips subtract, relays pass along, and one stimulus chip fires on its own. That is spatial summation, and it is the core mechanic of the puzzle.
Green cells are the notes this loop needs. Solve the board and the robot band member plays its part correctly; get it wrong and you hear exactly which note is off, because the synth is playing your wrong answer.
A chip that never reaches threshold is pruned away ("explodes"). A chip driven far past it dies of overstimulation. Both are real neuroscience and both will happen to you.
Built on NIH SBIR grants with classroom research at the UGA College of Education. The neuroscience is the subject, not just a theme.
Screenshots
Play Nurbits
Demo a single puzzle right here in the browser. The full game is on Steam, including fifty-odd puzzles, the music studio, and the full, customizable robot band.