Shape Squish

I first created the bones of this game in my sixth year of secondary school, but didn't touch it for another year. The core conceit is that you must move around on a grid, stepping onto shapes in order to squish them. But if you move onto a square that a shape is about to move to, you get squished yourself. In order to keep the game fast paced, there is a combo timer, which increases the rate of score gain, and encourages the player to play faster and more frantically, which is where the game is at its most fun.

The game was developed using Python with the game development library Pygame. This was my first real game written with Pygame, and I learned a lot about the library and about game development in general. I managed to develop a near complete game with fully functional gameplay, sound effects, UI, technical and accessibility settings menus, and music.

The biggest problem I ran into - however - and the biggest lesson that I learned for the future was performance. Since I was using a library that mainly uses CPU rendering, and since I wasn't optimizing my render calls in the slightest, the game had poor performance on older laptops, which was one of the devices that I was hoping to target. This was an important lesson for future projects about the importance of using the GPU where possible, and writing more performant code.