SQUISHD!
A collect-em-up action game for one to four players.
Escape the maze, eat tomatoes, collect treasure, don't fall in the water, and don't get squishd by the side of the screen.
Features
- One-player or same-screen multiplayer for up to four players
- Five different zones in one huge scrolling map
- Persistent hiscores
- Team and individual hiscores
- "Coop-etetive" multiplayer gameplay: you have to work with the other players to have a chance of getting the individual hiscore
Gameplay
The players control "tetrapods", trapped in a maze. The view scrolls randomly, and you must stay on screen to survive.
The maze contains tomatoes and treasure. Collect them to score points.
After two minutes in the first zone, you will enter the second zone. There are five zones in all, each with different challenges. The scrolling gets faster as you progress through the zones, and the time in each zone gets shorter. After the fifth zone, you will reach the exit. Move onto the exit to escape the maze. In a multiplayer game, all players must escape the maze to win the game, and players earn a bonus if they escape the maze before other players.
You lose a life by being squishd by the side of the screen or by falling into water. Each player has three lives. The game ends if any player loses all their lives.
Extra lives are awarded to a player when they score 500 points, then 1000 points, 2000 points, and so on. There are a few collectible extra life items in the maze, but they are hard to reach. Will you risk trying to grab them?
Scoring
Tomato: 1 point
Silver coin: 5 points
Gold coin: 10 points
Gemstone: 50 points when the gem is the same colour as your character, otherwise 20 points
Escaping the maze (multiplayer games only): Bonus, calculated as the average score of all players who have not yet escaped.
Hiscores are recorded separately for one-player, two-player, three-player and four-player games.
In multiplayer games, the entire team earns a score, calculated as the average of the players' scores. You can win two hiscores: the team hiscore and the individual hiscore. The individual hiscore can only be won when the team has won the team hiscore. Until the team has achieved the team hiscore, players must cooperate to push up the average score. When the team has the team hiscore, a flashing star is displayed at the top of the screen. At this point, players no longer need to cooperate and can go all out to win the individual hiscore.
Controls
On the title screen:
- Each player: press 🅾️ on their controller to join or leave the team.
- All players: having joined the team, hold down ❎ to start the game.
In the game:
- Use the direction buttons to move your character.
- By default your character runs while you hold down a direction button.
- Hold the 🅾️ or ❎ button to "creep" slowly by a single step for each press of the direction button. This is useful when negotiating tight passages or making risky manoeuvres near the edge of the screen.
On the game over screen:
- All players: hold down ❎ to return to the title screen.
The pause menu has options to:
- turn the music on and off
- clear all recorded hiscores
- abandon the current game and return to the title screen
Inspiration
Squishd! is inspired by the classic 8-bit game Splat!, but is not a remake.
Versions
Great work! I was only able to play 1-player, but I'll bet multi-player would be fun and hectic. I had to use the slow movement pretty much all the time because regular movement had me overshooting and running into the edges or just passing up what I was trying to pick up.
Slight problem, @dredds. You lose a life if you move off the edge of the screen. I can understand you are PUSHED off the edge by a scrolling wall, yet I don't think you should lose a life just by navigating off the screen.
Instead it should just stop you from moving off the edge. Only if you are pushed off the edge by a scrolling wall, perhaps trapped, would this could against you.
That’s intentional. It’s the way the game Splat! worked & changing it would change the risk/reward balance of the game. The gameplay depends on the gamble of snatching points near the edge of the screen. The “creep” mode (hold down either of the action buttons) let's players move precisely, which helps one avoid the deadly border when near the edge of the screen
The new version makes the lives display easier to see at a glance and shows the points earned by the player for things that have variable scores (collecting gemstones and the bonus for escaping the maze).
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