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.

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?

I’m still working on the new “capture by making two eyes” feature, but I’ve commented out that code and pushed out a new release because there have been many improvements, and I don’t want to bother making bug fixes in two different versions of the code.

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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.

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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I’m happy to announce the official release of Go Tetris 0.1 Alpha.

Basically, I’ve got it working to the point where I’d like some feedback.

Check the Go Tetris page to see the latest version and play.

Click below the fold to see release notes and TODO list.

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