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Quality-of-Life in Tetris Games

(jcarlosroldan.com)
163 points juancroldan | 2 comments | 09 Apr 25 13:10 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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jchw ◴[09 Apr 25 13:44 UTC] No.43632004[source]▶
I 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.

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1. juancroldan ◴[09 Apr 25 13:51 UTC] No.43632098[source]▶
Very 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)

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2. jchw ◴[09 Apr 25 14:56 UTC] No.43632876[source]▶
I tried playing sirtet for a while. That was pretty interesting. My brain kept wanting to orient the pieces as if I was playing Tetris leading me to occasionally do the opposite of what I was intending to do and dig myself into a hole both figuratively and literally. I found it pretty challenging to figure out a good strategy for stacking; there aren't so many lines to work with at once and the constraint that the soil has to be connected at all times adds a bit of challenge. I couldn't get very far and only managed to clear four lines a couple of times. I can definitely say now that I don't think 7 bag is a mistake for this. With the added challenge, having 7 bag and a hold window is probably a good idea.