Solo developer, 2023-2024
Squamble is a mobile word puzzle game available for free on the App Store and Play Store! This project was developed as a personal endeavor while working full time. I am so happy to have it out now!
The game is simple: try to spell a word within each of the 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.
Squamble has got all the hits of your favorite word games: a daily puzzle, streak system, an emoji-based sharing system, and 150 handwritten puzzles for offline play. The more I had people playtest this game, the more I saw that people wanted more content to play. I was happy to deliver!
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 happy to have this game out on the App Store and Play Store! Making Squamble has been so much fun, and has allowed me to combine all of my game development skills I have gathered over the years. I hope you give it a try!