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Amazing Tetris - Pre-release Version

I guess this is the right time to release my first ever video game - Amazing Tetris.



It's not completely done yet (therefore "pre-release version"). It's still missing most of its music (only the menu theme is done yet) and a user manual (although everyone should know the rules of Tetris). I will post more updates in this thread after C3 and won't go much into detail yet, since I'm way to tired. Just a trailer for you:

Video

Also I will post details on using your own backgrounds and music in my game here later. For now all you need to know is to copy the resource into either "graphics\custom" or "music\custom". Backgrounds can be TGAs or BMPs, music can be WAVs or OGGs and can only have up to two channels and be up to 3 minutes in length.



Download

P.S.:
Can you embed YouTube videos here? If so: How?
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
I don't quite get your choice for the controls, in most Tetris games I played, you rotate the piece with up/down and make it fall with something else, right now I'm mostly struggling with trying to keep myself from pressing up all the time because then I fuck everything up, but other than that, this seems to be a really solid game, gefällt mir auch, dass es nen deutschen Modus gibt.
Your layout has been removed.
Originally posted by leod
I don't quite get your choice for the controls, in most Tetris games I played, you rotate the piece with up/down and make it fall with something else, right now I'm mostly struggling with trying to keep myself from pressing up all the time because then I fuck everything up, but other than that, this seems to be a really solid game, gefällt mir auch, dass es nen deutschen Modus gibt.


Settings > Controls
You can even use a gamepad

Also I based this on Tetris DS, which used those controls.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
As I already told you in PM a few weeks before, the game looks quite awesome and after seeing the trailer, I feel tempted to finally try it out! I don't really know much about "amateur" game creation, but counting that this is your first video game, it's really great. Nice work, RPG Hacker!
Thanks! :)
It was pretty hard to do, too. It was all done in Pascal and using procedural programming. I'm glad that I just learned object oriented programming. It sure makes things a lot easier!
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!

Looks great. I love how you did the highscores, I may actually use that concept in my own game.

I could go ahead and look into every single detail and give a huge feedback post, if you want.



I might put some sort of signature here once. I guess.
Originally posted by JeRRy86
I could go ahead and look into every single detail and give a huge feedback post, if you want.


I'd appreciate it. At the this point I should probably also mention, that you can report any bugs you encounter to me. I'll try to fix them.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!

Considering my current limited time, I didn't have enough time to write down a big list, but here is the list with the main things I noticed:

Bugs:
-Unfocusing the screen makes the music sound like you just got a BSoD.
-I assume Line Clear mode isn't finished yet; In the description it says that "if the stone pieces reach the top of the screen...", implying that they would actually be able to.

Suggestions:
-It would be nice if you added a first-time play screen where you can see the controls, or anywhere else without the need of going into the controls screen.
-Listing the controls instead of seeing only one would also be appreciated.
-Make the waiting time before a piece locks in place at level 20 a bit longer. A lot of times, a piece locks in place just when I want to make another movement.
-The screen clears a split second before you enter a new menu; For instance, if you enter the settings screen there is nothingness basides the background for about .33 seconds. Try to not change the screen until everything is loaded.
-Changing the "Main game" option to "Start game" would seem a little more logical.

Annoyances:
-The *tick* noise can become quite annoying after a while.


I don't think there would be any major(or even minor) glitch in this game, seeing that it's kind-of difficult to find a glitch in a tetris game. That being because the concept is pretty rock-solid.



I might put some sort of signature here once. I guess.
Thanks for the detailed post!

Originally posted by JeRRy86
-Unfocusing the screen makes the music sound like you just got a BSoD.


Yeah, I've noticed. It's a glitch in Allegro 4, so unfortunately I can't do anything about it. :(

Originally posted by JeRRy86
-I assume Line Clear mode isn't finished yet; In the description it says that "if the stone pieces reach the top of the screen...", implying that they would actually be able to.


It is actually finished. What I meant with the description is "when the tetriminoes top-out, you lose all points". I didn't know how else to express it.

Originally posted by JeRRy86
-It would be nice if you added a first-time play screen where you can see the controls, or anywhere else without the need of going into the controls screen.


Good idea. I'll consider that one.

Originally posted by JeRRy86
-Listing the controls instead of seeing only one would also be appreciated.


That's what I had at first, but once I added more keys to the game it got too much to fit them all on one screen nicely. This seemed to be the easiest way to fix it.

Originally posted by JeRRy86
-Make the waiting time before a piece locks in place at level 20 a bit longer. A lot of times, a piece locks in place just when I want to make another movement.


I know what you mean. This happens to me a lot, too. It's actually intentional, though. That way I want to make the game harder at high levels. There is nothing worse than having the game too easy at level 20 and being forced to lose on purpose, just so the game ends. That is what I had before, so I reduced the lock timer. It just gets on your nerves pretty fast when the game keeps going on forever.

Originally posted by JeRRy86
-The screen clears a split second before you enter a new menu; For instance, if you enter the settings screen there is nothingness basides the background for about .33 seconds. Try to not change the screen until everything is loaded.


Yeah, this is due to the structure of the game. Unfortunately not much I can do about this, since it would require completely rewriting the game and even then in a procedural programmed game it would still be hard to do. Object orientation had made it easier.

Originally posted by JeRRy86
-Changing the "Main game" option to "Start game" would seem a little more logical.


Consider it done. If you find more misstranslations feel free to make suggestions.

Originally posted by JeRRy86
-The *tick* noise can become quite annoying after a while.


You can disable sound effects in the settings. Also it's pretty hard finding fitting and license free sounds effects on the internet. If you find some fitting and less annoying sound effects, feel free to tell me.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!

About the first one, try checking if the screen still has focus, and then disable the sound completely if it is.

You can try describing the pieces just like this: "If the top of the field is hit", or in any sense like that. You don't need to explicitly say "pieces" or "blocks" at all.

For the keys, you can try a scrollbar, or a different menu screen with only the keys. The easiest way isn't always the best way :p

Also, making the lock timer only 1/10th second longer would solve all my problems already. Normally I do fine on most Tetris games being at this type of difficulty, because I can make the movements just in time.

For the sounds, the best I can think of is Findsounds, but I haven't used that in forever so I don't know if it changed or not.



I might put some sort of signature here once. I guess.
Originally posted by JeRRy86
About the first one, try checking if the screen still has focus, and then disable the sound completely if it is.


I thought about this, but Allegro doesn't have that functionality and I can't think of another way to do this without too much trouble. I may look into this this again.

Originally posted by JeRRy86
For the keys, you can try a scrollbar, or a different menu screen with only the keys. The easiest way isn't always the best way :p


Of course not and I'm the last one to claim that. ;)
Normally I do a lot just for improving a program a little bit. For example: It was pretty hard getting OGG support to work, just to reduce the file size of music files.
What I meant was that doing something like a scroll bar or similiar with the game's procedural interface is so troublesome that it's not worth it since it's really only a minor improvement in the overall game and for those few keys that the game uses I think it's tolerable the way it is.

Originally posted by JeRRy86
Also, making the lock timer only 1/10th second longer would solve all my problems already. Normally I do fine on most Tetris games being at this type of difficulty, because I can make the movements just in time.


I'll think about it, although it would defeat the purpose. After all it is meant to make the player mess up sometimes at high levels, that is the whole point. ;)
Still I'll consider it. I guess 1/10th of a second should be fine.

Originally posted by JeRRy86
For the sounds, the best I can think of is Findsounds, but I haven't used that in forever so I don't know if it changed or not.


Yeah, I came across that site. Unfortunately no results that really fitted the game. Finding good and free sound effects is really hard. Eitehr you pay a lot of money or you need someone to create the sound effects for you.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!

What you can also try for the sounds, is download the demo version of FL studio. All those hundreds of sounds that it has can be taken, transformed and exported. You can't save project files though, but you won't need that anyway.



I might put some sort of signature here once. I guess.
I don't have much experience with any sound programs at all. But my friend has the full version of FL studio and I'm doing the music with him, anyways. We might look into the sound effects once we work on the music again.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!

Originally posted by RPG Hacker
I don't have much experience with any sound programs at all. But my friend has the full version of FL studio and I'm doing the music with him, anyways. We might look into the sound effects once we work on the music again.


Even better. With the full version you have even more tools to use.



I might put some sort of signature here once. I guess.
Originally posted by RPG Hacker
It was all done in Pascal

Good Jesus.
Originally posted by HuFlungDu
Originally posted by RPG Hacker
It was all done in Pascal

Good Jesus.


With a reason, though. It was originally a team project for Computer Science at school and we only did Pascal, so I would have had to force another programming language on my team mates otherwise.

UPDATE:
Just updated the game. Fixed a minor bug on the customization screen and also fixed the ugly random colors. They're now loaded from a table and not all that random anymore, which means no more ugly grey, black and brown tones.



Also, as promised, I'll go a bit into detail on using custom resources in your game. First backgrounds. As you know you can use BMPs and TGAs (also a few other formats I didn't test) and just have to save them in "graphics\custom". Custom images should be 320x240 in size, although any size is supported. However, the image is that scaled to fit the screen, which reduces its quality.

Another thing I didn't tell you yet is that you can even use animated backgrounds in your game. All you have to do is
-Create an image that contains all the animation frames from top to bottom. They all have be the same size. You can find an example image here.
-Edit the image's filename and put "[animate=n,f]" at the beginnig, where n = number of frames and f = frequency (number of ticks until next animation frame). So in the above example you'd call your image "[animate=4,10]SMWStars.bmp".
Once you've completed all those steps just put the image in "graphics\custom" and the game will automatically animate it.

Now about music files. As I said you can use OGG- and WAV files and have to save them in "music\costum". Another thing you can do is setup a custom loop point in the same fashion as with the animations. Just put "[loop=m,s,h,u]" at the beginning of your filename, where m = minutes, s = seconds, h = hundreds and u = sample units.

That's all for now.

EDIT:
I decided not to change to the lock timer, btw. Just played another game today and started at level 20. I got to 1,200,000 points without too much trouble and without a single mess up caused by the lock timer. Therefore I think once you know about the lock timer you get used it to it quickly (in the beginning I messed up a lot more), which means it fulfills its purpose and makes the game harder, yet not impossible to play. I like it that way.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
Seems like I forgot to mention here, but I also have a thread in Game Creation which I'll be using now after C3:

http://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=55168

I'll update it later and will also update my website.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!