I also registered Go-Tetris.com, which simply redirects to the game page for now. I’m thinking I’ll probably offload go-tetris onto it’s domain when I get some free cycles. I was going to do this today, but I forgot that I’m using chesstris’s database for the high scores, and I’m not sure if flash will transmit the high scores correctly across domains, so I’ll want to do some testing before I make that plunge.

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!.

Controls and Instructions:

Rotate Pieces clockwise: Up Arrow or “i”
Rotate Pieces counter-clockwise: “u”
Move Pieces Left: “Left Arrow” or “j”
Move Pieces Right: “Right Arrow” or “l”
Pause game: “P” or “SPACEBAR”
Move Pieces Down (faster): “Down Arrow” or “k”

Scoring:

Gameplay is a lot like Tetris, but instead of lines, the pieces break like Go captures. In Go, a stone is captured by surrounding it by stones of the opposing color (or by the edge of the gameboard). More than one stone may be surrounded in this way, and the more stones you capture at once, the more points you receive.

Groups of stones are also removed from the gameboard when they surround two or more eyes. Stones removed from the board this way are counted as “Territory”. See the in-game for more details.

You also get more points at higher levels.

Enjoy!

I’m really just writing to let you all know that I haven’t disappeared completely off the face of the planet. Most of my free time lately has been taken up with wedding preparations. Those are coming along great, but unfortunately, that doesn’t leave a lot of free time for game development.

I’m curious if anyone reading this would be interested in helping with Go Tetris!? I’m considering releasing most of the code as open source, and wonder if there is interest. If that is you, let me know, thanks!

Thanks for your patience!

I’ve spent nearly all afternoon trying to reproduce the “phantom stones” issue. Stones that appear, after a Living group is removed from the board, hanging in the middle of nowhere. When you try and set something down on them, it’s as if they’re not even there. Great fun.

I did finally reproduce it, and have some small amount of further information, but no idea why it happened in this particular instance and not the dozens of times I had captured living stones in the same game before.

Long story short, if you experience this particular bug, and you think you might know why, or how to reproduce it reliably, please leave a comment below.

Thanks!

Here is a list of the changes in this version:

• high-score tracking and name submit!!!
• fixed font sizes on end-game statistics screen
• fixed bug with being able to rotate pieces “underneath” the gameboard
• game is slightly faster, and thus a bit more difficult (almost unnoticably so)
• pieces fall based on time passing, rather than framecount

That last change was a suggestion by TONYPA in one of his tutorials on flash game development.

• You can now rotate counter-clockwise! (With the “u” key.)
• Fixed that pesky bug where the last character of the score was cut off if you got more than 1,000,000 points.

Thanks to stillflame for the comment about how to implement the “rotate left”. It’s a bit of a hack, because all the spaces for all three right rotations have to be empty for it to work… so there might be some weird behavior if you’re rotating at the last minute, but it’ll have to do for now.

For that matter, thanks to everyone who has left comments!!! I love hearing everyone’s thoughts and suggestions.

My next feature will be either a high score list, (with “submit your name” functionality), or possibly expanding the number of empty spaces that can be considered for an eye. I know how I’m going to implement that one, but it’s still going to take me an afternoon or two. That means I probably won’t get to it until I have a good solid day to spend.

Thanks for playing!

After pouring through the article, here are my first impressions.

I’ve actually thought about writing this very type of article before, and am rather upset I missed the opportunity to be the first. I might take a stab at my own version of his “family tree”, as I disagree with a few of his organizational decisions. Particularly with the placement of Lumines as a direct decedent of Dr Mario (wha!?!).

Also notably missing from the article was my recent favorite match-three, Puzzle Quest. Other games that were missing include: Puzzle Pirates, Zoo Cube, Zoo Keeper, Pokemon Trozei, and the relatively recent Honeycomb Beat.

I found the last two sections of the article, “The problems of writing a history” and “Why matching tile games?”, to be almost as interesting as the family tree. I think when I attempt to write my version of the tree, it will be a tree of all puzzle games, not just match-three, although this last paragraph from the article illustrates at least in part why the distinction might be meaningless:

“The principle of matching similar items is not new in game history: It can be found in a wide range of games including card games, Dominoes, and Mahjong. In fact, it can be argued as Raph Koster has done (2005), that pattern identification lies at the core of all games. In this perspective, matching tile games is the game form that most explicitly speaks to what most people find enjoyable about games: Looking for a pattern, finding it, and moving on, in search of ever more patterns.”

I think maybe I should look up this Raph Koster person.

Update: I have just ordered Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design from Amazon, and bookmarked his blog while I was at it.

I’ve also been reading Jesper Juul’s blog, and found the comments on his original post about match-three games to be particularly interesting.

In Go Tetris!, eyes can only be the size of one stone.

Above is one of the smallest two-eye groups possible.

Leave a comment if you have any questions!

I also added a check for those pesky “floating” stones that were basically hanging in mid-air all by themselves. Unfortunately, it’s much harder to check for groups of hanging stones, so those could still occur in the right circumstances.

I do think the new gameplay is very forgiving, and should make for a less stressful experience overall. More time for strategy and thinking!

A forthcoming post will explain how to make captures with two-eye groups.