Squish

Controls

• Navigation: arrow keys
• Confirm: enter
• Drop bomb: z
• Pause menu: space

Author's notes

This is a game that I made in the ancient days of 2006, shortly after I had learned how to program in C. It was the first nontrivial program which I wrote using the ncurses library, and was heavily inspired by code I read in a similarly ancient how-to document. The game itself is loosely inspired by the game "Gnobots" (I played this a lot back then), which was itself a graphical implementation of the game "robots" (and can still be played as part of the BSD games package).

Of course, the original code had plenty of problems (I didn't understand how header files were supposed to be used, my Java-trained brain was a bit too fond of unnecessary gotos, etc.), but it formed the basis for (almost) all of the games I made going forward. What I've uploaded here is a version that has been rewritten using a new engine, with which it ultimately shares some DNA. I've attempted to reproduce the gameplay as faithfully as I reasonably could, with a few quality-of-life updates (...I have spared you from the minute-long unskippable text-crawl every time you restarted, which I must have thought was the peak of game design). The in-game text remains unmodified, for all its cringe.