Quality-of-Life in Tetris Games

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.

I think it depends on what you want to make a clone for.

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.

I doubt this is going to be a popular opinion, but I honestly think Tetris 1v1 just isn't that interesting of a game. The interaction between players is pretty damn boring. In guideline 1v1 a lot of very high level games are decided by garbage RNG which I think is even less interesting than determining who is 0.1pps faster. I don't think either ruleset is particularly better for either players or people watching. Don't get me wrong, there's definitely a lot of tension in high level game play and so it's not completely boring, but to me it starts to get old once you realize what's happening, and I haven't really watched any high level Tetris stuff in a long time. I have a lot more fun watching Classic Tetris World Championship, because as janky as NES Tetris is, it's fun to watch people absolutely decimate it.

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.

> In guideline 1v1 a lot of very high level games are decided by garbage RNG which I think is even less interesting than determining who is 0.1pps faster.

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.