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Many years ago, I decided to write a Tetris game, just to see if I could. I succeeded, but the play area was very wide. So I added controls to make it adjustable. I figured the minimum sensible width was 4 (otherwise not all orientations of all pieces can be used). Playing Tetris on a board of width 4 (or Tet4 for short), I discovered, is very different to normal Tetris. Things change much more quickly, every piece has a profound effect on the state of the board and the normal Tetris strategies don't apply because it's impossible to play without leaving some gaps.

After playing for a while, I discovered that Tet4 was even more addictive than normal Tetris, and that it was much easier to get to the state of mental concentration known as "the zone" - where the entire rest of the world seems to melt away and there is nothing left except you and the falling blocks. When you notice this (and can do so without leaving the zone), it becomes almost an "out of body" experience - your conscious mind almost seems to observe from outside as your unconscious mind plays the game as if on some kind of automatic pilot.

Once I experienced this, I wanted to intensify it. I realized that a gradual increase in speed is intrinsic to the zone experience (otherwise it's just repetitive). But at a particular speed, the limiting factor becomes how fast your fingers can move to maneuvre the piece into place - this can take as many as 4 or 5 keystrokes with the normal Tetris controls. I realized that Tet4 only had at most 10 possible combinations of orientation and position for each block. Most people have 10 fingers so let's just assign one combination to each of 10 keys and have a finger corresponding to each key. This is the control mechanism that Tet4 uses, and it worked exactly as I had hoped.

This version is a rewritten version in JavaScript (because I wanted to learn the language, and because by making it run in a web browser more people would be able to play it). I've tested it on IE7, FireFox 3 and Chrome and it seems to work fine but there may be bugs with other browsers. Let me know if you find any. I've made some fairly substantial changes with this rewrite, which makes this a rather unusual and minimalist version of the game:

• A display which shows the position and orientation for each key (on my original version I learned the combinations by trial and error). This display is really just to reduce the game's learning curve a bit - to truly get into the zone you'll need to commit all the combinations to muscle memory.
• In my original version, the 10 keys just set the position and orientation of the tetroid - you had to press the spacebar (or wait for gravity) to drop the piece to the bottom and get the next piece. This meant a decrease in zone at the point where it gets too fast to use the space bar and you switch from 11-key mode to 10-key mode. In this version, the 10 keys drop the piece as well, so you always press 1 key per piece.
• In my original version, the game ends rather suddenly when your tower gets so high that there isn't time to think before your active tetroid locks. In this version, there is a "curtain" which falls behind the playfield, and you always have until it gets all the way to the bottom before your tetroid drops. This means that the amount of time you have isn't dependent on the height of your tower. Also, the piece doesn't enter the playfield until it is dropped, so you can take care even with the endgame (you lose when you drop a piece and it would protrude from the top of the screen).
• The single key control mechanism is rather unforgiving of misdrops, so I added an undo feature - at any time you can press Q to undo the last drop. This helps in learning the keys, but for getting the best scores it is best avoided as your score is also undone but the time speedup is not. This also doesn't allow you to "look into the future" (further than you can anyway with the next piece indicator) - a new tetroid is chosen at random for the new next piece whenever a piece is placed.
• I added a persistant, global high score table which includes a facility for replaying the top 10 games.
• I modified the colours and key to position correspondances to better take advantage of the symmetries. This puts me at a bit of a disadvantage (since I'm used to the original keys) but should be easier to learn.

One other thing I'd like to do in the future is make an ActionScript/Flash version so that it can be embedded into other pages. I started this but it turns out that without the official Adobe development kit, Flash is really hard to learn.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 4:00 pm and is filed under games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.