Because you have not provided a display tool to standardize the output to the screen, there is a slew of different ways to present the game this in and of itself will cause all kinds of issues with this challenge and doing and kind of performance challenges. I'd recommend strongly that you standardize how the game must be displayed and what objects you must use in order to do so. So that you can determine actual performance improvements on implementations presented. Though it is up to you. You are the one that presented the challenge in the first place.

Thanks for the input/suggestion! Part of the challenge is figuring out how best to render that large number of cells. I understand your point about wanting to standardize some of the variables with this but it is an unranked jam so its not meant to say that one implementation is overall better than another, but more of an open exploration to try different things and see what works well in certain situations. Ultimately the challenge is about starting with a base implementation and seeing how far you can improve performance for your specific case. Cheers!