I like the design of the blog a lot
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".
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
Any feedback would be appreciated!
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.
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
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)
TGM rules are more elegant and much more challenging for single-player tetris, but on the other hand multiplayer and especially 1v1 has far greater variety and dynamism with a looser rotation system. The stricter the rules, the more it becomes spamming tetrises against each other until someone misdrops. You have to construct a ruleset where a player who is 0.1pps faster doesn't just autowin.
To explain why check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QBs703nOnk&t=502s
Now if you want a good multiplayer puzzle game with super rich interactions, I think you just simply need a different game entirely, because there's no obvious way to weave some sort of responsive strategy into a Tetris game. Therefore, my pick for the ideal competitive falling blocks puzzle game is Puyo Puyo Tsu.
Also would like to note that, at least for TGM1, 2 and 3, the PRNG used is a 32-bit LCG (the common C one, in fact).
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3328480/TETRIS_THE_GRAND_...
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.
> Also would like to note that, at least for TGM1, 2 and 3, the PRNG used is a 32-bit LCG (the common C one, in fact).
Oops. It seems I have manufactured some false memories.
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.
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
Most other Tetris games (all that I've played, at least) throw randomized garbage at the opponent. It scales with the number of lines you clear, but it always has a one column gap in a random position, no control over that.
But TGM's garbage is deterministic. Basically, imagine taking the lines you just cleared, but remove the piece that completed them. That missing piece will be the gap. Flip what's left upside down and add it to the bottom of your opponent's stack.
Now you have full control over the position and shape of the garbage you send!
This adds a nice layer of strategy and makes the game feel more interactive since you need to constantly watch your opponent's stack and act accordingly. You want to add garbage where your opponent will struggle to clear it while also being on the lookout for what kind of garbage they'll be sending you and try to play around it.
And there are powerup items to spice things up, which admittedly vary widely in power level and can be very swingy. Although that's not necessarily bad as it allows players of different skill levels to play together (although the stronger player will still win most games), as well as just add some exciting or funny turnarounds. There's also a timing element to triggering the items, which adds even more strategy.
I have played a lot of (moderately high level) 1v1 tetris and I would have to disagree. In fact I often felt that the reverse is true - if I felt I died to garbage hole RNG, really that meant I was getting out pressured and would have lost eventually anyways. And while my playstyle was more aggressive, try to out speed opponent, I lost my fair share of games to people playing (much) slower but just incredibly efficient.
I agree there is an overall disappointing amount of interaction between players, though. Watching your opponents board and adjusting to it is hard and takes a while to build the skill to do. And a lot of the times you can just get away with it by playing faster and out pressuring and ignoring the other player.
> And there are powerup items to spice things up, which admittedly vary widely in power level and can be very swingy. Although that's not necessarily bad as it allows players of different skill levels to play together (although the stronger player will still win most games),
This seems to be a tricky thing to balance in competitive games. It's boring if the more skilled player wins every single match even in fairly close matchups, but it's also frustrating if any specific win/loss is dictated specifically by random chance or "unfair" game mechanics. This seems to essentially force game design to go a little off the path and overcomplicate things a little to try to make the game more interesting.
I strongly recommend taking a look at Puyo Puyo (particularly Tsu) if you are a competitive puzzle game enjoyer. It is a seriously good multiplayer puzzle game. Where Tetris is an excellent single player game and a good multiplayer game, Puyo Puyo is an excellent multi player game. You can see the game design issues play out especially over the early iterations of it; they pretty much nail the formula in Tsu, so most of the changes from thereon just kind of add additional complications that can make the game a bit more interesting and add some ways that someone can feasibly win a match against a better opponent.
Among the many puzzle games people play somewhat competitively (Tetris, Panel de Pon, Dr. Mario even,) I think Puyo Puyo is the one that deserves much more attention. Not that I think the game design behind Tetris multiplayer shouldn't be iterated on, but after seeing and studying high level Puyo Puyo play, it just makes it feel like Tetris multiplayer will never be able to have the same amount of depth. Of course, it's still plenty enjoyable, especially if you are playing Tetris multiplayer somewhat more casually. I definitely used to play a lot of online Tetris with friends. (Also, although it wasn't something I played a whole ton, I did spend a few hours on Tetris 99. I wasn't really the greatest at it because I'm just not that good at spamming setups but I was able to net a few wins.)
To be honest, I was never good enough for it to be a big issue, but it does seem apparent to me that it is an issue for the highest level players. I could be wrong, of course, but assuming I'm not, I think this brings up an interesting question: if it's something that you have to be so good at the game to have impact you meaningfully, does it really matter for 99.9% of players including myself who will certainly never get there? I guess the answer is probably not, but it does have a psychological impact of sorts. It definitely can make tournament outcomes feel less interesting.
So really random garbage just irks me because it seems like an unnecessary addition of RNG into an otherwise skilled game. I don't think random garbage is more fun than deterministic garbage schemes. I would suppose some people disagree.
The lack of serious interaction and a deep meta game, though... That's a bigger problem, yeah. I am not sure you can fix that while still producing something that you can really call "Tetris".
(And even when Nintendo called "Panel de Pon" "Tetris Attack" outside of Japan, I don't think it wound up having a terribly interesting interaction between players, either, despite being an entirely different game from the ground up! Still pretty fun though.)
It’s a bit of a shame Sega/Nintendo chose to localize the first game in the series rather than the sequel with the updated rules.
I played a decent amount of Puyo Puyo back in the day (mostly Tsu), but lost interest for two reasons:
1.) I had nobody to play against, and the AI in the old games wasn't very good. Neither of these are issues now though, with online play and much better AI.
2.) I could never get past the beginner phase. Making 4-5 chains really fast was usually good enough to beat the AI in the old versions, so I stagnated there. But that doesn't work against modern AI, and certainly not against humans. But I had no idea how to make the jump from beginner to intermediate; strategy just felt fundamentally different, and hard for me to figure out. Maybe I just never found good resources for learning that (this was 20+ years ago, probably much more out there now).
But yeah, it's a shame it never really took off in the west. Highly underrated game.
Also, Yakinery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ1UuE7kV_o
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.
It's my impression that Tetris 99 follows GM more closely than it follows NES.
Two mechanics that come to mind are (1) targeting bonus and (2) the finite garbage cap.
1. Targeting bonus makes it so that if multiple players are attacking you, your attack is buffed. Intuitively it makes sense, since it evens the scales a bit: If, by happenstance, you are unluckily targeted by multiple people, at least you have a fighting chance at surviving the 1v2 or 1v3 etc.
One counterintuitive consequence of this, however, is that an optimal strategy to farm KOs is to stack very high on the board so that you are in danger of topping out. A reasonable number of other players will have their targeting strategy set to KOs (since it is 1 of 4 options), and will target you. If a massive number of players are targeting you, a reasonably skilled player is in no danger because they can easily offset incoming damage with singles or doubles, buffed by targeting bonus.
Example of a game using this strategy to achieve 51 KOs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cat9TbAwRWU
Another consequence of this is in the teams mode, if the teams are imbalanced, counterintuitively, a top level player would prefer being on the smaller team over the larger team. To be fair, there is a certain skill floor required to survive the initial onslaught. But if you can survive and get KOs, the attack % buff you get from the KO badges will eventually give you an advantage over the larger team, eventually to the point where victory is almost guaranteed.
Extreme example of a player winning a 1v98: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTE4zEKtxkA Most normal players would not survive the initial influx of garbage. In particular, because the garbage meter is constantly full at 12, you are not even outputting any damage at all unless an individual line clear sends 13 or more (in which case, 12 of that cancels the incoming garbage, and a mere 1 attack is sent out).
But once you start getting KOs, you start getting badges, and eventually by the time the opponent team dwindles enough that you no longer have targeting bonus, you will have a +100% attack bonus from full badges, and you should be able to easily destroy the remaining players.
2. There is a garbage cap of 12. Which means if your garbage meter is full and more attack comes in, it just vanishes.
Intuitively this makes sense for balance reasons, to make the game feel less RNG/frustrating. If you are unlucky and receive damage spikes from multiple players simultaneously, your incoming garbage is never more than 12, so at least you have a reasonable shot at surviving.
A consequence of this however, is if you are on the backfoot and your garbage meter is filling up, it can be better to play slow than to play fast.
For example, suppose you have 8 incoming garbage. Instead of playing quickly, it can be a better strategy is to not place the piece, and wait for your opponent to send. Suppose your opponent sends 10 attack. Here, only 4 of that will go into your meter, and the rest will vanish. Then you can accept the garbage, and you will be in a better position than if you had played fast.
Even if you are at a badge disadvantage, it's possible to catch your opponent off guard with an unexpected counterspike, expecially if they have just sent everything and have no resources to defend.
Example of a Tetris 99 game where the final 2 lasted for 23 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoLh5w5rwS0 At 19:55 you can see Amemiya stalling until he sees that Doremy has no resources on his board, and then counterattacks fast.
A few years back, HardDrop hosted Tetris 99 snipe lobbies, and those lobbies would stretch excruciatingly long because even with badge disadvantage, reasonably skilled players are very, very good at stalling.
You could certainly never do a T-Spin Triple in ARS rotation.
(Though whether it's closer to GM than NES is an interesting question. It's certainly neither since NES Tetris is quite far from what guideline Tetris would become.)
- At launch there were some severe issues that denotes a rushed release and lack of QA. The most glaring of which being the inability to rebind keyboard controls (a patch is underway for this Friday). It's quite paradoxical since it's a game that was originally announced in 2009 (and has been cancelled 2 times; it's a whole saga that would be widely out of scope of this HN comment). In the other hand, it is a game that's technically rooted in 2009 (a DirectX 9 game that originally targeted a Windows-based arcade system like Sega Ringwide; TGM3 itself being released on Taito Type-X which is already a Windows machine masquerading as an arcade machine with arcade controllers bolted on).
- On the other hand, the dev team has been super reactive and the lead producer/director/whatever is the appropriate title is in Japanese regularly communicate with the community. And we know first-hand that one of the main dev is also a legendary player (Jin8; the first player who obtained the Gm grade in TGM3, a feat that only 20 people or so in the world has replicated) that has the game in his heart.
- Gameplay-wise, it is a much more accessible game, due to having to implement one part of the Tetris Guideline gameplay element (the lock delay behavior switched from Step Reset to Move Reset; the details and consequence of which I don't have time right now to explain). Detractor would say that it's another pollution by The Tetris Company, but I think this is a conscious choice and makes the game overall better (all of the ill effect of move reset being counterbalanced by the rest of the rotation system, and of course the insane speed). The overall difficulty is lower and hence more accessible, but some of the endgame challenges are devious (but that's through the incursion of gimmicks instead of simply the game system being what it is). It has not the austere elegance of TGM1, the rigorous beauty of TGM2 or the manic challenge of TGM3, but it has still all the heart of TGM in my opinion.
- However I do find the meta-game lacking because of the removal of many of "grades" (in the older games, the game judge you and give you a grade to either your game or your account; think of it like martial arts belt). There are still acknowledgment of finishing a game ( "you are {this or that mode} Master!"), but this is very, very difficult (and very, very rewarding), but there's a lack of intermediate rewards for experienced but not expert players. Allegedly this is a TTC decision, and I find the game worse for it.
- Overall it's still a solid game (and being in 2025 and this being not an arcade game, we can have patches and the dev seems willing and motivated to add fixes and new features in the future), and in my heart one of the best Tetris out there. Tetris Effect has a way better eye-candy (it is a Mizuguchi game after all), but if you're willing to play with "TGM" rules instead of Tetris Guideline rules, it's mechanically incredibly rewarding.
EDIT: top steam review says the reviewer primarily plays the game on their Steam Deck, so I guess it's good