Two packages of ramen are laid on the conveyor belt in a grocery store checkout lane...probably by some college student. It's not an uncommon site, really.

But then it appears the two packages of ramen are not as dry and brittle as they might appear. They're quite spry, in fact. They have legs, not to mention faces, and they are determined not to meet the same fate off in some dormitory as their brethren.

They begin to run against the grain of the conveyor belt, anything to stay away from the beep of the scanner that spells doom. They dodge cartons of eggs, collect soy sauce packets and vault over produce. A cat sometimes appears to drop knowledge...or just announce that it's a cat.

The fate of the ramen is certain (college students have to eat, after all), but seeing how long they can avoid that fate is just a game to anyone who downloaded the free app released for the iPhone and iPod Touch on Jan. 8. Players use their fingers to move the two packages of noodles left and right on the conveyor as they attempt to flee, and touch them to jump over objects. The game always ends in their doom, but players rack up high scores by lasting longer.

It's called Super Ramen BROTHers, and it's the brainchild of developers Alex Schwartz and Yilmaz Kiymaz...kind of. The two were actually hanging out on New Year's Day when Schwartz said he proposed the idea to make an iPhone game in one 24-hour day, starting "right now."

"We thought it would be a good idea but didn't have any immediate ideas that would fit the bill," Schwartz, 22, answered via a Google chat interview. "We realized there's no lack of game ideas floating around in people's minds, so we offered the design portion up to the community."

The plan was to reach out to the forum for "absurd" ideas for the gaming experiment. Schwartz said he needed to write an example though, to show the forum members how they'd like the ideas formatted, and his "off-the-cuff" example involved a ramen package in a supermarket.

"A bunch of people thought the idea had to do with ramen, so we had lots of derivative designs generated from my ramen idea, and we eventually went with Sailor Jensen's idea of a third-person jumping/dodging game on the conveyor belt of a cashier station," Schwartz explained. "We chose this idea due to its reasonable scope."

The duo took about one hour fashioning fake ramen caricatures of themselves to photograph along with a cat to post as the developer photo when they reached out to TouchArcade.com. The post went out at 3:30 p.m. Eastern that day, and by 6:30 p.m. they had chosen an idea. The clock started ticking at this point, Schwartz said.

Schwartz and Kiymaz played by "game jam" rules, where once notified of design criteria, development must start right away. They allowed themselves the use of code from previous projects for things such as co-routines for audio fade-in or helper functions, but the majority of code had to be written within the timeframe. Schwartz said they used the Unity iPhone engine, which provided the toolset to creating the 3D style of Super Ramen BROTHers in such little time. Schwartz' girlfriend, Elisabeth Beinke, even pitched in with some art assets for the conveyor belt, while a Boston game artist named Matt Board was contacted that day and agreed to create the ramen character art and animations. Finally, Steve Trenkamp, an old college roommate of Board's, pitched in some music.

"We felt that if we could pre-plan our idea too much, we would over-design the end product and it would lose its charm," Schwartz said. "We wanted to show that it's still possible to make something quick and dirty with $0, a friend and some energy drinks. Also, working under heavy constraints or limitations oftentimes yields more creative work."

Schwartz said the 24-hour development cycle turned out to be more fun than grueling, in large part due to the collaborative effort and the encouraging remarks gamers left in the forums throughout the process. He said the pure adrenaline of knowing people were interesting in the project kept them going for most of the day, and Bawls energy drinks helped with the rest. He slept for 21 hours after the game's development was completed.

"It was a great experience and we'll definitely do it again, Schwartz said. "Super Ramen BROTHers definitely reached the silliness bar, but we feel that some of the controls are a bit wonky and there are aspects that could definitely be improved."

"I'm not sure if we're going to update the app, but it's a possibility," he added. "That would ruin the 24-hour aspect though."