I'm not so much talking about Pac-man type games, but more like the creatures stage of Spore or the old E.V.O. The Search For Eden, where you eat stuff to collect points which are used to develop yourself. Basically a variant of the kind of game where you shoot stuff to get money to upgrade your ship, or the kind of game where you race to win money to upgrade your racing vehicles/animals. Or games like Katamari Damacy and Tasty Planet where your goal is just to get bigger. But right now I'd like to focus specifically on games about eating.

What are your favorite games where the main gameplay dynamic is eating? Any you would recommend to someone who wanted to study this type of game and design a game of this type? What is particularly unique, interesting, or fun about this game's eating gameplay?

Way back when I used to play this Intellivision game where you were a little fish and could only eat smaller fish to grow. Bigger fish would eat you instead. Sharks would eat you always, but you could kill them by swimming over its tail three times.

Found it: Shark! Shark!

Because it is so old, it has pretty much the bare basics of that type of game play: eat to grow to eat bigger things (predators become prey), and of course something to limit the game (the shark) so a high score means something other than spending time.

If you are looking for something more recent, there is Osmos. This game throws in a few other factors (attractors, anti-matter motes, sentient enemies) which complicate the simple idea of eating the smaller while avoiding the larger.

What about 'The Maw' on xbox live arcade? You guide your big mouthed pet to eat the scenery to develop it further, who then gets bigger so he is able to eat bigger items.

I've been looking at these different games. I think, over all, I like best the ones where what you eat becomes resources that you then spend to do something else. This type of game seems to just interest me more because there are more dimensions and complexity to the gameplay. So now I'm imagining a game where you have a home nest/den/whatever, you go out and eat stuff, much like standard MMO combat you get crafting resources as drops, then you use them to upgrade your home.

What about taking some aspects from Kirby? In Kirby you eat your enemies to gain their powers. For instance eating a laser shooting enemy lets you shoot lasers. Although in Kirby you could only hold one power at a time.

I’m sure I played another game a long time ago in which eating certain kinds of enemies changed your stats giving you some of that enemy’s special characteristic. Eating lots of poisonous creatures made you more poisonous so you hurt other creatures when attacked for example.

Perhaps you could combine those together with some farming sim elements? Points and quests could unlock new evolution options for your creature but also allow you grow your own enhancers at your farm. That way once you buy the fire breath ability you can then raise chilli peppers at home which depending on your design either activate fire breath as temporary ability, or provide a small permanent increase in fire damage each time you eat one.

Perhaps you could also look at games where the player collects things? The animation is different, but conceptually both are based on finding/catching an object or creature and taking it from it's current placement for your own gain. The idea of collecting things to improve a nest or den also makes more sense to me than doing so by eating things.

Have you played Animal Crossing? I have the vague memory that I was trying to collect a lot of things in that game, although I can't recall if I was doing it for gameplay reasons or not...

Perhaps you could also look at games where the player collects things? The animation is different, but conceptually both are based on finding/catching an object or creature and taking it from it's current placement for your own gain. The idea of collecting things to improve a nest or den also makes more sense to me than doing so by eating things.

Have you played Animal Crossing? I have the vague memory that I was trying to collect a lot of things in that game, although I can't recall if I was doing it for gameplay reasons or not...

Well, I was specifically thinking that eating the opponent would collect energy which is spent later to produce the offspring/creatures who live in the nest and provide it's labor force (your servants). But collecting also fits, because I want some physical upgrades to the nest which might involve spending wood and rocks. Although, eating -? architecture would make sense in terms of some kinds of animals like spiders, snails, molluscs, and corals, which produce structure from their own biomaterials.

I did play animal crossing a little (I got bored with it) and it did involve collecting and feng sui of decorating your house with the collected stuff.

In Castle Vania: Dawn Of Sorrow (DS) you gather souls from killed enemies (random "drop" on kill) and learn to use their abilities. Gathering more souls increases the effect/duration etc of the soul abilities you allready have and you can equipt one active and one passive soul if I recall correctly.

"Grinding" Souls can be tedious as the "drop" is totally random but it added a whole lot of fun and customisability to the gameplay.

The effects range from puzzle solving (like zelda, to overcome obstacles and explore new areas) to different attack and defense abilities.

What a fun idea! It's kind of like the grimoires used in Vagrant Story, and FF7 has a yellow metaria which collects monster abilities used against you, but I never really thought of making spells a more common monster drop that players could learn incrementally while farming the monster. I'm not sure if it fits in the eating game, but either I've got a game concept in my file that it would go great in, or I'll make a new one around this idea.