Slime Salad

James Paige · Last edited by James Paige on Thu Oct 22, 2009 5:26 pm; edited 1 time in total

This is a review of Tetris (DEMO).

This is great. It is missing "type b" mode, but it is really polished and cool. it manages to be both very retro and very flashy at the same time.

The first version of Tetris I ever played was the one for the NES. I wish that had looked half as nice as this.

I very much hope that shakeyair continues to add bells and whistles to this, but even if he doesn't he already has something to be proud of.

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EDIT: My video was inexplicably mangled. I will re-post it as soon as I figure out how to fix it!
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In the video, the warning I see on the title screen is caused by an attempt to change the frame of a sprite slice that has already been freed. This will probably be an easy fix for shakeyair if he switches to the latest nightly build, which is much better at spotting such errors and helping you find them.

Also, in the video I comment that the game was made wwith the stable release, but now I think that isn't true. it looks to me like it was made with some recent nightly build, but I can't guess which one.

Tetris always gets to me in an addictive way. It was hard to resist just continuing to play and play. Killing myself with that "Tetris Tower" at the end was harder to do than I made it sound.

=Things I would like to see=
* Keyboard controls for rotating on both directions (I like period and comma for this)
* Joystick/Gamepad control (actually, I didn't even plug in my gamepad. Maybe this is in there already?)
* Mouse control - this is a tricky one. Getting side-to-side motion just right for mouse-controlled tetris is hard to do in a way that keeps the difficulty level correct. But it would be nice.

Newbie Newtype · Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 3:50 pm Post subject:

The video isn't displaying properly.

shakeyair · Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 4:17 pm Post subject:

Losing the game quits it simply because I haven't gone to the trouble of figuring out what all I need to free and reset and zero out. (Also, the title screen needs some time to let all the tetronimoes on the title screen fall, which will be sneakily covered up by the high score screen) (...That is a secret don't tell anybody...) This is also the reason for the two useless intro screens (eventually I have a bit of an animation planned).

Basically, it's a demo. Extended keyboard control is a good idea, as is mouse (but mouse control would likely demand a lot of new code that I'm unsure I want to mess with)

But the options screen will have a way to remap keys, assuming I can get that working. I had planned on SPACE and ALT, but i think I like . and , better, because that gives me less excuses to not make a 2-player mode.

Joypad control would be awesome, but I have no idea how to begin tackling that, having never messed with it. (can Key Val even take a joypad input??)

Newbie Newtype · Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 4:43 pm Post subject:

James Paige · Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 4:45 pm Post subject:

For the title screen tetronimoes, what if you disable the "wait" commands when you are filling the screen up?

As for knowing what to clean up, you can use a script like this to free all your slices

shakeyair · Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 5:09 pm Post subject:

i am currently trying it to be sure, but the plotscripting dictionary explicitly states that the joystick scancodes don't work with key val. i will let everyone know if it does happen to work.

shakeyair · Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 5:17 pm Post subject:

does not work with key val. works just fine with keyispressed, but does not feel as solid (its important that the blocks only go left or right one space if you tap the button, and with keyispressed this is not always the case.

James Paige · Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 8:25 pm Post subject:

Newbie Newtype · Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 9:08 pm Post subject:

Thank you. That will make custom title screens more viable now.