Go Tetris! 0.6 alpha

New version tonight just fixes a bug introduced in the last version when you pause the game while the pieces are “exed” out. General wonkiness would ensue. Sorry about that, it’s fixed now. Thanks go to Dave for pointing yet another bug out! (This one before I noticed it!)

Bonus link of the day while I’m at it: I’ve been totally addicted to this game called “Ununicum“, a flash game by some guy who calls himself TONYPA. All of his games are worth checking out, but this latest one is especially addicting to me. I really like how there is no time constraint, it’s all strategy (and a bit of luck, I suppose), but anyway, there’s no feeling of hurry that is often paramount to puzzle games in general.

Go Tetris 0.5 alpha

New version tonight! I haven’t had a lot of time to work on the game this week, but this new version does have some good stuff in it. One you’ll notice right away, and a couple of others you might not:

  • Stones are now marked with a red “x” before they are removed from the board. This slows the game down minutely, and also gives you visual feedback on why the pieces are breaking.
  • New key mappings! Now you can play with jkl & i… I added the details to the instructions page.
  • Finally, when you break any stones now, if a part of the piece you just dropped is still “hanging” in the air, it’ll fall and rest on the next lowest resting point. This is ONLY if you break some stones with that piece. This is a very subtle change, but I think it will improve gameplay. (And fixes the dubious “bug” where you could leave a stone hanging in the air with no other stones touching it if it was played in a position to capture some pieces directly beneath one of the columns but not all of them.)

I still have tons to do, but I’d love feedback on these new features. Especially if you have any opinions about the timing of the new red “x”es marking captures. Do they stay too long? Too short? Does it seem okay?

bit Generations

I am probably way behind the times here, but I found out last night that Nintendo’s handheld game consoles are not region encoded. I think I may have been aware of this fact at some point, but this was made eminently relevant when I read a post over at Inverted Castle about Five Japanese Gameboy Games Worth Importing. I immediately ran over to play-asia.com to purchase as many of those awesome looking bit Generation games as I felt was justafiable in one go. I’m now eagerly anticipating Coloris, Soundvoyager, Dialhex and Digidrive. I would have ordered Orbital as well, but it’s in-stock status said a week rather than 24 hrs.

Hybrid Games

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” -T.S. Eliot

If you subscribe to the idea that all ideas have already been thought up (I don’t,) then the natural last bastion of creativity is to start combining ideas in new and interesting ways. Permutation city. Of course when you think about that for a while you realize there are probably near-infinite combinations of ideas, and the line between “new idea” and “a combination of previously existing ideas” gets blurry.

Here at Chesstris we’re all about the hybrid games. Go Tetris! is obviously a hybrid game. A “mashup” if you will, of an ancient strategy game, and one of the most popular and viral games invented in recent history. Read on for more about puzzle game “mashups” and about my latest game addiction.

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Interesting Tetris Links

A co-worker sent out this simple Tetris implimentation in Javascript. (Using JQuery.)

From there (reading the source code) I ended up on wikipedia reading about the Tetris Effect and Tetrominos (which I’ve never spelled correctly before). Tetris even has its own category on Wikipedia. I should probably read up on how wikipedia categories work before I say this, but it seems like a fairly incomplete list.

Anyway, from the Tetris Effect page, I ended up reading an old Wired article titled This is your Brain on Tetris.

Go Tetris! 0.3 alpha

New in this version:

  • Totally revamped how gamespeed works. Starts out twice as slow, and you have to get to level 10 before it’s as fast as it was falling before. I could slow it down even more now without issue.
  • Moved score above level in the right-hand pane.
  • The game now keeps track of largest black capture and largest white capture. These are displayed on the game-over screen.
  • Debugging has also been made slightly easier by changing when I print out a debug matrix of the gameboard.