Solo developer, 2023-2024
Squamble is an upcoming mobile daily word game that I have been developing as a side project. Try to spell a word within each of the five rows using the tiles provided. White tiles can be moved within their own row, but cannot be placed in an empty slot. Yellow tiles can be placed in an empty slot in any row.
I have designed and engineered this project from top to bottom. Designing the game was a delightful exercise in iteration; I tested several word games with similar-but-different premises before landing on the design presented here.
Programming for mobile meant committing every design choice, both frontend and backend, to work with the affordances given by smartphones. For the UI, this included making buttons readable, limiting text to distract from the gameplay, and coding motion graphics for polished presentation. Under the hood, I had to optimize the drawing of UI significantly to retain the game's smooth frame rate. I also engineered a cloud NoSQL database to deliver daily puzzles to users' devices via REST API.
I am so excited to release Squamble for Android and iOS soon! Making this game has been so much fun, and has allowed me to combine all of my game development skills I have gathered over the years.