Musings by Generator

Development, Life and everything else in S.A.

Tetris – Hello world.

 

Developing a tetris game is considered by most in the game development world a great “Hello world” game. They say it has a great combination of everything, so you touch on most things required to do 2D games.

So with this in mind, I thought my first game should be a Tetris clone. So I have started on it, and haven’t really gotten very far with it to be honest but that is because I am only working on it when it is quiet at work. So far I have completed the following:

    • Designed the grid, and developed logic to move pieces around the grid.
    • added in logic to auto drop the shape if no key is pressed by the player.
    • Applied a background.
    • Developed logic to direct a small one piece block around the grid to validate game logic such as grid bounds, collision, grid cell state.

The next thing I want to do is work on logic for the individual shapes, and get them moving around the grid and once that is done, I will be working on pivoting the shapes.

From there it is a small matter of adding some scoring to it, next piece info block, and a menu structure. Ideally not a lot of work left but knowing me it could take forever.

Here are two screen shots of what I have so far:

Tetris1

Tetris2

Will keep posting updates as I go along. 

A game idea, well some what

If you haven’t played Pandemic 2 by crazymonkeygames..com, I suggest you do. It is not the best flash game I have ever seen, but man it is addictive, it is simple enough to pick up, and the way Madagascar and New Zealand always shut you out is frustrating enough to keep you playing till you kill everyone in the world.

What has given me an idea is not the actual game but the premise of the basic UI, and user interaction (mouse  with mouse over events etc etc).

I like the idea behind these map based games.. make the map simple, like in pandemic 2 where they have used basic regions which everyone is familiar with, simple highlighting of the region that you are mousing over. Obviously, I have really simplified their UI but it is the just of it.

But the UI idea is there. So I think I am going to have a look at developing some game, what the game will be is still to be decided but I want to try using a map of the world with simple icons etc etc to indicate POIs and players etc.

I will try to fester up an idea for the actual game over this long weekend and see what I come up with, and hopefully, I will be diligent enough to blog about the development as I go a long.

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