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EDIT: Better URL https://github.com/jstimpfle/tetris-on-a-plane/ https://github.com/jstimpfle/tetris-on-a-plane/ I had fun building this and experiencing the j

EDIT: Better URL https://github.com/jstimpfle/tetris-on-a-plane/ https://github.com/jstimpfle/tetris-on-a-plane/ I had fun building this and experiencing the joyful side of JS (or at least the browser ecosystem). Boarding a plane I'd had the idea of finishing a simple tetris before arrival. The game was in a working state after ~2 hours, even though I had made a few bad decisions. (it was subsequently polished, investing another few hours). It was made with a "get things done" mindset, and the experience from dabbling with purely functional programming in Haskell was very helpful (mostly the "pure", as in "non-destructive", part). It's nice that in Javascript we have an environment where we can code a fun game in <400 lines, without any library dependencies (not even internet connection needed) or build systems. On the downside, if it had stronger dynamic types and errors (like Python) that would have saved maybe 25% of my debugging time, probably without coding overhead.

agentultra 10y ago
It is pretty cool. Feels very much like a smalltalk-ish environment. A WebGL context is a single HTML tag and a couple of lines of code away. However you can still get the productivity boosts from an ML-like language... there are options. And ES6 supports some patterns of FP out of the box (though it is made better with small library support). Maybe checkout Bucklescript, Purescript, or Elm for the next one :) One of my rituals of taking a long trip is to finish a small coding project before I land. Sudoku, minesweeper, tetris, forward-propagating constraint solvers... it's a nice practice. Thanks for sharing yours!
zzguy 10y ago
Had you made Tetris before? Or used an external resource to see any pseudocode? Reason I'm asking is, I was doing a similar thing with Snake and it took me a bit longer (probably 4 hours) because I messed up the basic mechanics in the beginning (I didn't think of how to structure the growing body as a linked list). I want to gauge how much I suck (at least at games programming) lol.
- jstimpfle 10y ago
  I once spoke about it with a friend who had to do it in C. However C is a dangerous trap here, I think it gets you in the wrong mindset. Data representation is pretty universally one of the most important things (basically the "design" part to me). Four hours is pretty quick I guess. Snake might be more difficult (but an array or llist + snake direction + board map should be straightforward). I'd done chess that week and the representation is also doable unless thinking about AI or history or... which is when I quickly go bikeshedding. Multiple different representations for different tasks (and transforming in between) might be a way to go.
  - pgt 10y ago
    I made Snake in 103 lines of ClojureScript for a talk once: https://github.com/pate/cljs-snake https://github.com/pate/cljs-snake (LOC excludes whitespace and links to repo). Comes in under 100 LOC if you strip out the aesthetics.
    - jstimpfle 10y ago
      Very nice!
  - rbirkby 10y ago
    Check out the encoding of the tetrominoes in this implementation: https://github.com/jakesgordon/javascript-tetris https://github.com/jakesgordon/javascript-tetris My subsequent port to C and Arduino was very natural: http://youtu.be/t3QOeQbEHVs http://youtu.be/t3QOeQbEHVs
  - electrum 10y ago
    Here's one I wrote a long time ago in Z80 assembly for the TI-86 graphing calculator: https://gist.github.com/electrum/76ac88de2e1d6c9254deaba003a74b6b https://gist.github.com/electrum/76ac88de2e1d6c9254deaba003a...
    - bbcbasic 10y ago
      The "Random" subroutine looks surprisingly simple

agentultra 10y ago

It is pretty cool. Feels very much like a smalltalk-ish environment. A WebGL context is a single HTML tag and a couple of lines of code away. However you can still get the productivity boosts from an ML-like language... there are options. And ES6 supports some patterns of FP out of the box (though it is made better with small library support). Maybe checkout Bucklescript, Purescript, or Elm for the next one :) One of my rituals of taking a long trip is to finish a small coding project before I land. Sudoku, minesweeper, tetris, forward-propagating constraint solvers... it's a nice practice. Thanks for sharing yours!

zzguy 10y ago

Had you made Tetris before? Or used an external resource to see any pseudocode? Reason I'm asking is, I was doing a similar thing with Snake and it took me a bit longer (probably 4 hours) because I messed up the basic mechanics in the beginning (I didn't think of how to structure the growing body as a linked list). I want to gauge how much I suck (at least at games programming) lol.

jstimpfle 10y ago
I once spoke about it with a friend who had to do it in C. However C is a dangerous trap here, I think it gets you in the wrong mindset. Data representation is pretty universally one of the most important things (basically the "design" part to me). Four hours is pretty quick I guess. Snake might be more difficult (but an array or llist + snake direction + board map should be straightforward). I'd done chess that week and the representation is also doable unless thinking about AI or history or... which is when I quickly go bikeshedding. Multiple different representations for different tasks (and transforming in between) might be a way to go.
- pgt 10y ago
  I made Snake in 103 lines of ClojureScript for a talk once: https://github.com/pate/cljs-snake https://github.com/pate/cljs-snake (LOC excludes whitespace and links to repo). Comes in under 100 LOC if you strip out the aesthetics.
  - jstimpfle 10y ago
    Very nice!
- rbirkby 10y ago
  Check out the encoding of the tetrominoes in this implementation: https://github.com/jakesgordon/javascript-tetris https://github.com/jakesgordon/javascript-tetris My subsequent port to C and Arduino was very natural: http://youtu.be/t3QOeQbEHVs http://youtu.be/t3QOeQbEHVs
- electrum 10y ago
  Here's one I wrote a long time ago in Z80 assembly for the TI-86 graphing calculator: https://gist.github.com/electrum/76ac88de2e1d6c9254deaba003a74b6b https://gist.github.com/electrum/76ac88de2e1d6c9254deaba003a...
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    The "Random" subroutine looks surprisingly simple