10 ms·
Show HN: Lazy Tetris
I made a tetris variant
Aims to remove all stress, and focus the game on what I like the best - stacking.
No timer, no score, no gravity. Move to the next piece when you are ready, and clear lines when you are ready.
Separate mobile + desktop controls
- tantalor 1y agoFeature request: to make it even lazier show a preview of where the piece is going to end up when it lands, like a ghost image
- fellowniusmonk 1y agoThere is a ghost toggle on the right side.
- sherdil2022 1y agoIt is good but not intuitive. Also the line doesn’t clear when all tiles in the row are filled. It is good to show the shadow of the piece where it would fall - at least as an option.
- vunderba 1y agoNice job. Add in some Nintendo Wii lobby style music to give it that extra chill vibe. FWIW, you can also do this on TETR.IO in Zen mode - just set the Gravity to 0 and turn Leveling off.
- deadbabe 1y agoMaybe you can also let us remove collision detection and also let us pick the next piece?
- irjustin 1y agoStill managed to kill myself trying to do a "full screen" tetris. Somehow I always end up finding ways to add the stress back in.
- em-bee 1y agowhy is that stressful? i find a puzzle like figuring out how to fill the screen fun and relaxing. i'd like to see a few improvements for that though: don't end the game just because a piece touches the top row. allow to continue playing as long as there is room for more pieces to be placed. (i just noticed that doesn't happen all the time. maybe only when the next piece doesn't fit into the spot to be placed) but even if there is no more room, don't end the game when there are rows that still can be cleared. the game should only end when no other action is possible. and ideally, don't automatically clear the field when the game ends. let me admire the result, and add a reset button to clear manually instead. other features that could be nice: when starting over the hold should probably be cleared. a bigger hold would also be nice. and how about a score? relaxing doesn't mean it can't be competitive. i mean we all experience stress differently. i find being pressured for time to be stressful, but i don't mind a hard puzzle as long as i have time to solve it and am not losing progress when i make a mistake. i managed to fill 17 rows without clearing any before the game ended. can anyone beat that? you'd have to be very lucky with the pieces you get at the end :-)
- op00to 1y agoSomehow this is an apt metaphor for life.
- ggoo 1y agoI would recommend renaming this project to not include the t word.
- wvbdmp 1y agoThis is a great idea and I love it but somehow I’m randomly having issues hitting the Drop button, which make this unbearably stressful/frustrating. (iPhone SE)
- sali0 1y agoI love this, spent more time on it than i thought i would. You should make this into a native mobile game.
- cube00 1y agoThis kind of simple game feels like it would be perfect to remain web/PWA based, what benefits do you foresee in a native mobile version?
- sali0 1y agoWould be nice to pop it up on the phone via an app. PWA would also be nice. But main reason is so he can monetize. Would gladly pay a few dollars for this.
- solumunus 1y agoMonetisation.
- johnisgood 1y agoWith screen blocking ads popping up every 5 seconds? :D
- Ylpertnodi 1y agoWith 'several' X's on the ads....to make closing them a 'game'.
- hansmayer 1y agoAwesome stuff, but have you considered adding an MCP interface so that an AI can play it instead of us :) :)
- metayrnc 1y agoWow this is such a great idea. Also the controls on mobile were top notch. No issues with random zooming, text selection, weird scrolling etc. Felt like a downloaded app.
- SaturateDK 1y agoSeems to be down currently.
- admtal 1y agoHoping the Netlify free tier holds up, wasn't expecting front page
- bemmu 1y agoThis is like Tetris with creative mode.
- alana314 1y agoFun! Can we get a keyboard shortcut for clear?
- admtal 1y agoThat is such a good idea, I’ll prob add tomorrow
- Obscurity4340 1y agoWhat if you start at a reasonably easy gravity but progressively ease up on it so things get slower and theres a baseline to move down from rather than it always being free and easy
- geon 1y agoCool. The drag gesture is slightly broken though. If the piece collides with the wall, it sticks instead of sliding.
- hnlmorg 1y agoPlayed for a little while and didn’t get a single L piece. I’m guessing you’re picking pieces randomly? If you wanted to further reduce the stress then you could use the single bag system (same link as below, bottom of the page). [1] https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Tetris/Pieces#L_piece https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Tetris/Pieces#L_piece
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- keepamovin 1y agoYour stuff is very fun. Look at this, this crazy little thing (by same person): https://passwordbasket.com https://passwordbasket.com :)
- izietto 1y agoI laughed so hard I'm worried I bothered my neighbours!!! This is terrific!!!
- admtal 1y agoThank you so much, that is all I want to hear in the world
- airstrike 1y agoIt genuinely made me smile!
- hoosieree 1y agoI never before considered that a password generator could be fun. My mind has been changed. Now I believe they should be fun.
- simlevesque 1y agoThat just put a smile on my face.
- raydev 1y agoI was shocked by how hard I laughed when I "generated" the password. Great work.
- redbell 1y agoCool, and it might be cooler if the generated password's characters go straight to the basket. Just my two cents. Also, this reminds me of The Password Game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36493715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36493715
- furyofantares 1y ago
- Stem0037 1y ago[dead]
- darkwater 1y agoCool idea! Playing on desktop with a keyboard, I cannot move pieces up when they reached the floor, though. I moved one piece down too much thinking it was possible to move it up again and that caused me to stress a bit ;)
- admtal 1y agoOn desktop you can click and drag
- lynx97 1y agoWhile we are at unconventional tetris implementations: I wrote a cosmopolitan libc based tetris clone for Braille display users. IOW, pieces "fall" horizontally, and blocks are rendered with (unicode) braille. https://github.com/mlang/betris https://github.com/mlang/betris Big thanks to @jart, cosmo is a godsent for cross-platform TUI stuff.
- alnwlsn 1y agoI made one once which was just like normal Tetris, but you could fight against gravity and move the pieces upwards. It actually doesn't change the gameplay that much, because eventually you progress far enough that you just can't push 'up' fast enough, and gravity wins.
- Suppafly 1y ago>but you could fight against gravity and move the pieces upwards I love that idea, sometimes you just need a little time to figure out where you want to move/rotate it to.
- lynx97 1y agoPressing 'p' to pause the game basically gives me the same cheatcode :-)
- Kaibeezy 1y agoThx for the instant Radiohead earworm :)
- SuperHeavy256 1y agoI love cosmo, thanks @jart for developing.
- bramvanleur 1y agoIt would be great if undo would make the piece appear at the spot I dropped it from. So I can correct mistakes by "undo", "left", "drop". But what I am really looking for in Tetris is the game to train me. After observing me play for a few minutes it tells me: _"Hey, I notice you always deal with L pieces horizontally. Proffesional players usually prefer to X so they can achieve Y"_
- Ylpertnodi 1y agoAI Tetris?
- PetitPrince 1y agoTetris the Grand Master 4 (that has been released recently on Steam) has a training mode that suggest to you where to place you pieces. You can even select different goal for the CPU (survival, make as much Tetris as possible, make as much T-spin as possible, ...). Of course when it gets fast your brain cannot process the suggest and it's kinda useless, but it's a good first step. Also the fundamentals of Tetris are simple to recite: maximize your piece placement possibilities / minimize your piece dependencies, avoid overstacking over holes, be mindful of your piece mobility; this can boils down to "play flat but not too much".
- jorisboris 1y agoThis was quite fun!
- aronhegedus 1y agoI randomly got 4 line pieces at the start, thought this was going to be a line piece only Tetris variant :D
- lorikmor 1y agoI played it and thought it was dumb initially but then I loved the way it was not stressing me. Interesting concept
- filt 1y agoNice! But a ghost piece would be helpful!
- francislavoie 1y agoThere is one, there's a toggle for it on the right
- xnickb 1y agoAs someone who tried to be good at tetris but has failed miserably, this has potential to be a good tool to practice lookahead. Of course for that one'd need to have an option to see next N pieces in the queue. But it's indeed a nice and relaxed take on tetris.
- Brajeshwar 1y agoI laughed out like crazy for minutes on reading the title. I had to re-visit one of my regular saying and I thought that was cool but it ain't no more, “Business is Chess, and Life is Tetris.” I’m going to move the first piece down sometime soon.
- albert_e 1y agoI love this. Thanks.
- jsheard 1y agoJust a word of warning, the Tetris Company is pretty aggressive about protecting their trademarks. I'd at least pick a different name, but sometimes they even go after Tetris clones which don't use the name (e.g. Apotris). https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/adcac3eddac2e5555d87942db25b11e3654dbd17/2023/02/2023-02-10-tetris.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/adcac3eddac2e5555d87942d...
- franze 1y agoThats why I never mention the T word once on my variation https://ihopethisisfun.franzai.com/ https://ihopethisisfun.franzai.com/
- rplnt 1y agoWhat they go after is not just the name, but the shapes. But I think you are fine as long as you do not monetize or get popular.
- GolDDranks 1y agoWhich is crazy, because the shapes are just an idea, and you can't copyright ideas. They also couldn't be a trademark infringement (IANAL, though) if you don't use them in your branding.
- johnisgood 1y agoTrying to copyright shapes or blocks of various shapes is wild to me.
- rplnt 1y agoThey don't claim copyright on the mechanics. They pursue trademark violation. If it has falling tetrominos, it might be confused with Tetris, is the idea. You can use different shapes and be fine.
- nashashmi 1y ago
- Charon77 1y agoThere's a bug where the ghost doesn't update its position after clearing.
- stevage 1y ago"lazy" doesn't feel like the right name. More like low stress. I really enjoyed it.
- didSspin 1y agoAfter fiddling around for 3 minutes, I managed to do an illegal L spin.
- anArbitraryOne 1y agoI still suck at it
- Arcorann 1y agoNeat. However, I noticed that the page description reads "No stress, memory-optimized 3D Tetris variant.", but I can't figure out what's supposed to be 3D about it.
- admtal 1y agoHa, I missed that. The AI prob wrote that. It thinks it’s 3D because it’s using the three JS library and I was asking for performance optimization ideas
- leansh 1y agoThanks for this, another feature I generally like is showing a shadow where the piece will end up
- op00to 1y agoThis is awesome! Love the idea. Great work.
- mihaaly 1y agoLazy Tetris is definitely my game! : )
- the_af 1y agoWas this vibe coded with AI? Based on one of your replies here, and your post history, I think it is. I also think some of your comments here are also AI-generated, e.g. this one where you both posted a submission and asked yourself to "stop posting AI generated garbage": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36841921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36841921
- admtal 1y agoYup, vibe coded with rosebud ai from my phone, and some ChatGPT I swear I can code for real, I was just having fun
- the_af 1y agoCan you explain this comment you posted a while back, on your own HN submission (you talking to yourself?): > "Adam, congrats on your book, but please stop spamming this message board with your AI Generated garbage" Note if the above sounds aggressive, I didn't write it. You did... in reply to yourself! To be honest it seems as if you're writing comments using an LLM, and the LLM got confused.
- admtal 1y agoI actually wrote both the post and response myself I was in a bad way and really wanted attention online I’m trying to think of why I wrote that, in my own way I guess I thought it was humorous
- ilker2495 1y agoGreat idea, played until I got a fullscreen clear, I really like it but the single rotation key is annoying, I suggest having separate clockwise/counter-clockwise keys. Also single bag randomization algorithm please (look up 7-bag, 7BR), bag makes even NES Tetris super chill since you never get overwhelmed or left waiting for a long piece. Another suggestion is to add a "ghost piece". Basically a display for where the piece is going to end up if you hit drop. Others in this thread are right. You should avoid the "-tris". My favourite Tetris clone calls itself "Shiromino" for example. Maybe "Slo'mino" to emphasize the slowness of it, or something like that, I'm sure you can come up with a way better name. I don't mean to be overbearing this is a very fun idea and I enjoyed my time with it!
- heisenbit 1y agoI prefered moving the piece down into the right place. I found it a bit annoying and also not intuitive to have to press ‚drop‘ for a piece which was down already and which i released. Would be nice if it auto-dropped on drag release when at the bottom. Last but not least: Fun and relaxing.
- tianqi 1y agoMe tried the first minute: this guy missed everything about game design. Me after 1.5 hours and wondered why hadn't stopped: I know nothing about game design.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- admtal 1y agoThis made my wife and I laugh
- admtal 1y agoThank you all for playing and leaving such great suggestions and comments!! I will likely add many of these suggestions over the weekend. - Multi bag instead of fully random - No auto clear on game end - Clear hold on game reset - Rename to LAZY PUBLIC DOMAIN BLOCK GAME also, I need better UX or something, because some of the suggestions are already implemented but it’s prob not initiative/ hard to find. Clicking on the ghost enables the ghost piece. I personally hate ghost pieces, and I always disable them, so because it’s my game, I have it off by default. Tapping left side and right side rotate left and right. Keyboard Up and Shift rotate left and right. Delete key does UNDO Enter does HOLD You can touch drag or click drag to move your piece, even dragging up. Oh, also you can drag from anywhere, you don’t have to actually click the piece. You can two-finger tap to DROP (that’s how I play, it’s so satisfying) Three-finger-tap is HOLD You can save to home screen on iOS and it should play as a full screen app. If you get a “Tetris” (four line clear at once) a secret gift button appears, but it’s just a link to my book, because everything I do is soulless cash grab. I’m lazy, and built this game sitting on the couch on my phone using a mix of rosebud.ai and ChatGPT. I also had to get in my laptop to do performance optimizations manually, that part sucked, it was like real work. But otherwise, vibe-coding is fun. This game is made specifically for me and how I like to play, and I’m glad others enjoyed it!
- jedberg 1y ago> Clicking on the ghost enables the ghost piece. I personally hate ghost pieces, and I always disable them, so because it’s my game, I have it off by default. I love this. You made a game for you, if others like it, great! > Enter does HOLD When I got to my first hold I had to go back to the Home Screen to see this, because I'd forgotten. And clicking "hold" with the mouse didn't do anything. Maybe have a list of the keys on the side? Or under where it says "hold"? > If you get a “Tetris” (four line clear at once) a secret gift button appears, but it’s just a link to my book, because everything I do is soulless cash grab. I might actually get the book! Looking at the sample it looks fun. Could be a card game too. > This game is made specifically for me and how I like to play, and I’m glad others enjoyed it! I did! It's great for people with kids, because you can just stop in the middle.
- jchw 1y ago
- layer8 1y agoI wouldn’t call it “lazy”, because all the manual dragging is actually quite tedious work. ;)
- osm3000 1y agoGosh this awesome! Thank you! That put a huge smile on my face ♥
- maplant 1y agoIf you happen to find the opposite of this fun, check out Tetris the Grand Master 4 which just released on Steam.
- eternauta3k 1y agoI thought the opposite would be https://qntm.org/files/hatetris/hatetris.html https://qntm.org/files/hatetris/hatetris.html
- maplant 1y agoApparently this tetris clone has a relatively unforgiving piece generator, so I'd say the opposite would something on the other end of the speed spectrum
- __s 1y agoUNDO doesn't clear HOLD
- tiberius_p 1y agoI still suck at this game, even with all the help.
- acjohnson55 1y agoThis is really cool! My kids like watching me play Tetris, but they don't like playing themselves because of the speed of the game, even when it first starts.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lastcoyotes 1y agoWhy does the yellow button link to an amazon listing?
- admtal 1y agoIt’s for the authors book, it’s a cheeky calling card
- onehair 1y agoThe Joy of Ctrl-U view source and actually finding the SOURCE available to read directly in the browser!
- kristopolous 1y agoI wanted to drag them after they're dropped. That'd be great: "no you're going over there."
- carlsverre 1y agoI think this is the first time I really enjoyed playing tetris. Terrific idea!
- cshimmin 1y agoThere's a board-game version of Tetris that I've been playing with my toddler, and is pretty much the same low-stress approach. It's also multiplayer (the next piece everyone must use is decided by drawing cards from a deck). The only shortcoming is that you can't do the maneuver where you slide a piece sideways just as it hits the bottom to slot it into place under another piece. Highly recommend!
- freedomben 1y agoReally neat! Would love an "auto clear" setting though. Is it open source? This seems like a fun project to hack on
- admtal 1y agoI’ll Prob open it up this weekend
- RRRA 1y agoNeeds to be able to rotate in place or certain moves usually possible are now unattainable, but great otherwise
- enahs-sf 1y agoi had some interesting thoughts while playing about how this aligns with the work of startups. Even with the constraints of time and gravity removed and with undo, it's still quite easy to make choices that keep the structure up but leave gaps which are hard to fill in. These end up leading to cruft that's hard to get rid of. With some degree of ability to look ahead, it's hard to break away from the human psychology of aligning the structure to your expectations for a certain piece, that may or may not be coming in the near future. somewhat analogous to building for an audience that may not be there or may never come. Despite having all advantages, it's still quite possible to paint yourself into a corner and fail. One can learn a lot from this game if they take the time to observe it.
- jccalhoun 1y agoIn firefox on desktop I just get a black screen?
- simonmysun 1y agoI send it to my wife and she couldn't move the pieces because the page preview exits when she swipes. There are several tricks to disable this default behavior and it would be nice to add them
- admtal 1y agoHow do I lock the preview window?
- experimentctrlz 1y agoThis is super fun and relaxing. Maybe this is me being supremely lazy in Lazy Tetris, but I wish there was a way to fully clear the whole thing to reset the game without refreshing the page. That would let me play this endlessly. Thanks for making and sharing!
- crvdgc 1y agoKeep stacking until you "lose", then the stage is set up again.
- EdA1 1y agoI had fun with this! Nice job :)
- malkia 1y agoThis is not easy as it sounds!!!
- platevoltage 1y agoOMG my non-gaming partner who kind of likes Tetris, but doesn't like how fast the pieces move will LOVE this.
- NooneAtAll3 1y agoyou should probably add an error popup when webgl is disabled it's black screen for me
- kazinator 1y agoThis is good as a "Level -1" for small kids .
- freeone3000 1y agoI love this! It really allows you to examine the role of time pressure in gaming, and why tuning it is so key -- having too much time makes it significantly easier, to the point where it wasn't fun for me. Which is brilliant!
- fallinditch 1y agoNice job, fun and relaxing
- teo_zero 1y agoWhy not completely removing gravity? Instead of "drop", the button could "fix" the piece where it is.
- tremarley 1y agoMake it compatible with more browsers please
- cookie_monsta 1y agoThe more constructive way of putting this would be to mention which browser you are using. Judging from the comments, it works in plenty of browsers
- ajb 1y agoNice. One point - on Firefox on Android, tap to rotate seems random. I often seem to need to tap more than 4 times to get the orientation I want.
- badmonster 1y agonice
- rothos 1y agoI played for a while and didn't get a single "I" piece.
- hmcamp 1y agoBrilliant!
- sammywammy 1y agohey