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Quality-of-Life in Tetris Games
- zavg 2y agoI like the design of the blog a lot
- qsort 2y agoThe rabbit hole runs much deeper, this is a specification of the rotation system for current (modern) Tetris games: https://harddrop.com/wiki/SRS https://harddrop.com/wiki/SRS The "modern" rules ("guideline", as the community calls them), with Hold, 7-bag, multiple previews and a rotation system that allows easy T-spins make for more interesting multiplayer games that go beyond "who can spam Tetrises the fastest".
- mitsu_at 2y agoSRS makes it possible to build funky piece elevators: https://x.com/sukiyaki_060910/status/1876957439976726658 https://x.com/sukiyaki_060910/status/1876957439976726658 Also, Yakinery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ1UuE7kV_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ1UuE7kV_o
- amichail 2y agoAs you may know, I have been working on DropZap World, a falling block game with lasers for many years. It lies somewhere between Tetris and Candy Crush. Getting the game mechanics right has been hard and I've tried numerous variations on the game rules. I think I have something that works now. Check out the beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/CdEXgjst https://testflight.apple.com/join/CdEXgjst Any feedback would be appreciated!
- normanthreep 2y agoyess we know! just this morning i said to my wife "darling i've been thinking about dropzap world again," and she said "the falling block game with lasers that amichail has been working on for many years? me too!" i said "he thinks he has something that works now" and she responded "i know, it's amazing" of course we know amichail. it's all we're talking about these days
- jchw 2y agoI have a somewhat contrarian opinion. I think if you're making a clone of Tetris you should actually take design cues from the somewhat more obscure Tetris the Grand Master series instead of the "guideline" or NES Tetris rules. TGM's rotation and kick rules are a lot more elegant and avoid a lot of unneeded complexity. Guideline Tetris kicks let you do absurd and weird things (look up the series of kicks that make up a T-Spin Triple and see if that makes sense to you) and rewards doing canned setups really fast, whereas TGM's game design is all about doing good stacking very fast. The TGM randomization algorithm is also pretty elegant. 7 bag is a bit extreme, it gives you such a perfect set of pieces at all times that it's genuinely less challenging and fun. TGM's random piece algorithm is a lot simpler: the randomizer has a 4-piece history window and it tries multiple times (IIRC, 6) to find a unique piece that hasn't appeared in that window. It is initialized to SSZZ to lower the odds of starting with an S or Z early on. (~~They also use the Mersenne Twister as their PRNG, which was a pretty good PRNG in an era where many games still used LCGs.~~ edit: Apparently, they do not. Don't ask me where I got this, I have no idea.) Now of course I'm not sure if it matters at all for this particular game since it isn't really a Tetris clone at all, but while TGM is a well-known cult classic for people deep into Tetris it's relatively obscure outside of that circle (and presumably outside of Japan.) The Tetris Company is very strange about licensing and has apparently, as the legend has it, blocked and forced changes on TGM releases for a very long time due to the fact that it doesn't fit with the Tetris guideline rules they enforce in an oddly totalitarian fashion, probably suppressing the game even further in an era where speed games and competitive gaming is a lot more popular.
- manbitesdog 2y agoVery insightful! the 4-window blacklist is such a good idea. I feel like 7-bag is a bit too predictable if you're able to keep up with the counting. And you're right, some of the rotation and kick rules you mentioned are actually not changing much in this game because there's not a collision between pieces, only overlap: since floor kicks and t-spins are not possible, we optimized those for simplicity (it's a 48h game jam in PICO-8 after all)
- jchw 2y ago
- zabzonk 2y agoAh, Tetris. I remember stripping out the copy protection from the MSDOS version with a debugger. Not because I wanted to resell it, which would have been difficult back then, just because I found it irritating. I also added mouse support, once again using a debugger, for Hercules Graphics to a wargame - it was the ever popular Battle of the Bulge, by a famous designer who's name I can't remember. Guy that did Eastern Front on the Atari. Edit: Chris Crawford
- euroderf 2y agoDid you also remove the copy protection ? What is the third word in the second paragraph on page 37...
- franze 2y agoi created a not tetris clone here https://ihopethisisfun.franzai.com/ https://ihopethisisfun.franzai.com/ (not tetris in a flipping / rotating board with vertical lines also possible) and I learned more about the SRS (super rotating system) then i ever wanted to know, think it is still off and i might give it another try soon
- iNic 2y agoPeople who want play tetris _fast_ (on places like jstrs) will prefer the "real" rotation to the "NES" rotation, because it allows you to place pieces with fewer button presses. To explain why check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QBs703nOnk&t=502s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QBs703nOnk&t=502s
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jstanley 2y ago> Before we implemented this, we played entire games with not a single stick piece in over 100 pieces Are you sure there wasn't some other bug? There's a 6/7 chance of not getting a stick piece, which means for 100 pieces in a row there's (6/7)^100 = about 1 in 5 million.
- manbitesdog 2y agoThere's a non-zero chance that it was around 30 pieces and we felt it like 100. Our quick testing the game for the jam was not very scientific. I just changed it to "~30"
- inputvolch 2y agoWell it's a good thing you exuded such a confident number in the article to make your point when you very well knew it was completely made up. Definitely gives the reader confidence that the rest of the article is completely true!
- ziddoap 2y agoThis is a ~400 word blog about tetris, not a research paper about curing cancer. Maybe some slack can be afforded?
- taneq 2y agoUnless they weren't seeding their RNG, which means every game could be the same.
- manbitesdog 2y agoPICO-8 initializes it for you upon loading the game
- throw10920 2y agoI really like the implied general principle of the wall kick - if the user tries to do an action in a state that doesn't allow it, if there's something that's useful and pretty close, do that instead. For instance, I'm building a tree editor with vim movement keys, and I found that a "j" that brings me up to the first child or next sibling node is strictly more useful than a "j" that only descends to children and a "l" that only goes to the next sibling. Obviously, you have to be very careful to avoid introducing footguns, but the idea of "don't dogmatically adhere to operation semantics" is good.
- munificent 2y agoThis is, I think, one of the deepest arts in user experience design. It comes up in games, but I find myself applying it all the time when designing a programming language too. A human sitting at a machine and pushing buttons is expressing some sort of intention. When the machine can do exactly what they requested, easy, do that. But what happens if their intentions don't seem to make sense given the current state of the system and/or their previously indicated intentions? In the context of Tetris, it's them trying to rotate a piece when they've moved it too close to the wall to do that. In a programming language, it can be that they've defined a function that's declared to take a string and then they wrote a call that passes it a number. Sometimes, you can make a pretty confident guess as to what they are trying to do and have the system either do that instead or at least use that assumption to explain why the system can't do what they requested. But deciding when a guess is a safe bet for the system to make and when it will be wrong often enough to confuse users is really hard, especially as the complexity of the system and the diversity of the userbase scales up.
- curiouser3 2y agoApotris (https://akouzoukos.com/apotris https://akouzoukos.com/apotris), a GBA "demake" of tetris is one of the cooler ones I've seen with regard to QOL. Lots of settings for tweaking controls and sensitivity that make it possible to fine tune the game to just feel fantastic to play
- Dwedit 2y agoThere is also "Tetanus On Drugs" on GBA (later renamed Lockjaw: The Overdose), which uses Mode 7-style distortions to simulate the experience of playing Tetris under the influence. I'm not 100% sure of which rule set it uses, but it does have hold pieces and delayed piece locking at the bottom.
- relistan 2y agoApotris is the funnest version of this that I’ve played. I have it on an R36s and also on my iPhone via emulation. Works better with native controls but still fun on the phone.
- curtisszmania 2y ago[dead]
- isolli 2y agoSide question: how can I introduce my son to the joys of Tetris? Is there a good game available somewhere currently? I tried to find one for the iPad, but came up empty-handed.
- downsplat 2y agoThat brings some memories. I got into tetris around 1988 on a 8086 PC with 5" floopy drives. Somebody gave me a copy of a very early tetris, it was a tiny DOS .com file, and the game was in text mode, written by the original Russians. I must have spent entire weeks on that thing, and when I learned programming, I proceeded to write a whole list of tetris variations, including one hexagonal, one for 3 players on a single PC, and a regular Tetris in assembly that fit on a boot sector. To this day it I open a tetris, I expect the exact rotations as that original version. Never got into these easier random generators - all my clones used full random pieces. Except for one where the machine would always throw you the hardest piece :)
- blaix 1y agoI love this. Noting to implement in my own toy tetris clones.