Go Tetris! 1.0 — release notes

A lot has changed in this new version, and it feels to me like a whole new Go Tetris!

The new features include two new Game Modes (“Fast” and “One Color”), multi-space eyes, keyboard menu navigation, in-flash tutorial (that still needs a bit of work), and a bunch of bugs fixed behind the scenes.

New Game Types or “Modes”

Here’s more about the new game modes, pulled directly from the in-flash tutorial:

Fast – For more advanced players. Levels progress faster and each capture is worth more points!

One Color – The hardest mode of all. In this mode you play as Black. White captures are scored normally, but Black captures are worth negative points! As if that wasn’t enough, Black territory is scored normally, but White territory is subtracted from your score. Have fun!!!

I have plenty of other ideas for additional game modes in the future, but these were just crying out to be made. It was bugging me that in a normal game it might take me over an hour before I died, so I whipped up “Fast” mode. “One Color” mode was always floating around in my head waiting to happen. It is quite the brain teaser.

Keyboard Navigation

You should no longer have to use the mouse to play Go Tetris! …except on the new tutorial page. I haven’t quite got that figured out yet. (Eventually, I’d like ‘n’ and ‘b’ to navigate next and back.) Unfortunately, I realized last night that there is a bug if you try and enter your name for the high scores, and you have an ‘m’ in your name. It takes you straight back to the main menu, and there’s no getting back to the game over screen. That’s first on my “to fix” list.

New Tutorial

I’ve spent a ridiculously long time working on the tutorial so far… and if you click through the whole thing, you’ll realize it’s not even done! I was sick of not releasing this version because there was “one last” thing to do, so there you go.

Bugs Fixed

The big one was the whole “phantom hanging stone” after a large two-eye group was captured… I added a TON of debugging code, and after dozens of hours of playtesting I eventually found some pretty egregious bugs in the eye detection and removal code. I don’t know if it helped or didn’t help that I’d written a bunch of changes for multi-space eyes, and I was seeing the bug far more often than in the last release. Anyway, I think I’ve got all capture/territory bugs squashed, but let me know if you experience anything else that seems wrong.

Multi-space eyes

I banged this out back in July, I think, but then spent a lot of time “fixing” it when I fixed the aforementioned bugs.

A Special Thank-You

Big thanks should go to my wife Florence (we were married September 2nd) who put up with me working on this during our honeymoon. Without her, I doubt I would have even written the first version of Go Tetris!.