Friday, June 22, 2012

Tetris 1D now exists :)

I guess I wanted to challenge the idea (nicely expressed here http://www.kongregate.com/games/zigah111/tetris-1d-2-0?referrer=zigah111 ) that a 1 dimensional tetris is obviously stupid.

In the standard 2D tetris you have shapes and colors, and the feeling you have when playing is that you control the way your pieces fall, sometimes their speed, their position and rotation.
I wanted to see if some of the feeling could be kept in 1D. I think colors are clearly allowed in 1D, so I decided to use them as shapes are used in 2D, to classify the pieces.
Rotation would not make sense with simple square pieces in 1D, so I went for swapping the falling piece with the top of the pile below; I thought this might keep the impression of being in control of the falling piece during its fall. However swapping alone was too limited to make the game fun or non-trivial :)
So I (and the nice folk that suggested so many variations on facebook) explored a few other options: a good one is reversing of the pile, which to me has a kind of formal-methods, string-manipulation feeling that fits well with a single dimension. Other operations that were considered are right shift of the pile, swap of the first and second half of the pile, and randomization of the pile.

Anyways...
The current version of the game is playable with keyboard or mouse, it works at least on chrome for windows.
HERE IS THE GAME.



New features:
- audio
- experimental support for touch for android
- levels

It would be nice to have the time to clean up the code (which is so horrible that it might have been written by a bunch of visually impaired monkeys, with limited understanding of scripting), and improve the levels. I would like to be able to change few things from a level to the next:
- how many colors are possible for the blocks in that level
- speed of the falling block (a classic!)
- enable or disable special operations, like in some levels you might have the randomize button active
mirror the game left-to-right
and more advanced things could be:
- have many pieces to fall at the same time (a very interesting suggestion from Arturas)
- bonus pieces that allow to destroy all pieces in the pile with a specific color (for example)
- pieces falling from both sides


Also adding a few special effects, like rotation of pieces when swapped or splash screens between levels.
Perhaps using a spline instead of a straight line, to align the pieces in a more creative way, also to play a bit with the fact that it is a 1D game, but the screen is 2D anyway ... :D

2 comments:

SDX said...

Impressive! It's super simple and still really entertaining. I absolutely love it. Have you thought of a licence for your work?

Andrea Valente said...

Nop. Do you think I should? :>
How do you like the other attempt?

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