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?

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.

Go Tetris! 0.2 alpha

The current release adds a “next piece” preview to the right of the game board. Now that my dream of actually playing this thing is realized, I was really starting to miss that look ahead when the game starts to speed up. (Didn’t hurt that at least two of you gave me feedback that it was something you wanted, also.)

While I was at it, I fixed a bug that allowed rotating the “J” shaped piece into the left wall when a piece on the right was pressed up against it. Oh, and while I was adding the piece preview I also pretty much re-wrote the attach movie code to do things in a way that made a bit more sense.

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Calling all Testers… High Scores?

I’m planning on changing the game speed sometime in the near future, so this may be shortly irrelevant feedback, but I’d love to hear about people’s high scores and play experiences. Questions I have are, is the game too fast? Too slow? Too easy? Too hard? What level do you get to when you play? What score?

As for me, I’ve been averaging burnout around level 4, but I just had a game where I got to level 6. I usually get between 800 and 2000 points, but this last game was 5769. I captured 116 stones, 30 white and 86 black. Is it totally silly that I’m all excited about a high score in my own game?

Anyway, add a comment with your high scores and playtest feedback!

Thanks!