I'm glad to hear I'm not the only person to have re-written Tetris a number of times over the years. Usually it's what I use to try out a new game framework.
Twenty years later I wrote a Tetris again
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Re: Twenty years later I wrote a Tetris again
#22Great story. I recently made my own tetris game, though since I wanted to put it on the app stores and not get sued, I had to come up with a "tetris without being tetris", which was a great creative exercise. In the end I made a more unique game with some gameplay that is rather fun (IMHO) that would never have come to be if I just made a straight clone.
Thanks for posting this. I'm always on the lookout for interesting Tetris variants. I purchased (on iOS) for Quad Blocks, after playing it on your website.
Thanks! Always interested in what people think and how I can improve.
Re: Twenty years later I wrote a Tetris again
#23I've implemented Tetris 5 or 6 times over the period of 20+ years. This is my standard exercise to learn/try a new platform. I wrote one in C for custom smart phone/PDA prototype we were developing in 1994, then I wrote one in assembly for Zaurus PDA, another one little later for Palm Pilot, few more I do not even remember, and the last one 2 years ago to learn some OCaml (text-based and SDL versions) https://github.com/vzaliva/otetris .
This is a great exercise.
Re: Twenty years later I wrote a Tetris again
#24Fantastic! I had a similar experience in the mid 90s, though I wrote a Zork clone :)
Re: Twenty years later I wrote a Tetris again
#25Yes because with improved tools we are expected to do more things to achieve the same goals. Doesn't this mean we are becoming more inefficient ? I wouldn't agree with calling those tools "improved", in that case. About the size of the code: the code I wrote this time is roughly one third of the size of my original code which probably means it has less bugs and is more maintainable That neglects to consider the fact…
The demoscene is amazing fountain of technological progress. I feel sometimes like it's the abstract math of the software world, off doing lots of very impressive useless stuff, until some little piece of tech filters its way down and revolutionizes part of an industry. For example, lots of sceners now are bringing things like procedural generation of art assets to the masses, but it's been a common technique in the scene for decades.
This particular compo has a long history and lots of different challenges: http://www.hugi.scene.org/compo/compoold.htm
- A brainfuck interpreter in 98 bytes
- Nibbles in 48 bytes (some of the disqualified entry reasons are also equally interesting)
- Maze builders in 122 bytes
Re: Twenty years later I wrote a Tetris again
#26I've implemented Tetris 5 or 6 times over the period of 20+ years. This is my standard exercise to learn/try a new platform. I wrote one in C for custom smart phone/PDA prototype we were developing in 1994, then I wrote one in assembly for Zaurus PDA, another one little later for Palm Pilot, few more I do not even remember, and the last one 2 years ago to learn some OCaml (text-based and SDL versions) https://github.…
I use Tetris to learn too, here my last implementation in javascript, I've started to learn Nodejs and how to reuse code with browserify, the version worked in the terminal and the browser.
I would like to take time to rewrite it again in ES6/7, and then start learning other things like AI.
edit:
https://github.com/alfonsodev/tetrinode/tree/dev-0.2
Re: Twenty years later I wrote a Tetris again
#27Yes because with improved tools we are expected to do more things to achieve the same goals. Doesn't this mean we are becoming more inefficient ? I wouldn't agree with calling those tools "improved", in that case. About the size of the code: the code I wrote this time is roughly one third of the size of my original code which probably means it has less bugs and is more maintainable That neglects to consider the fact…
The demoscene is amazing fountain of technological progress. I feel sometimes like it's the abstract math of the software world, off doing lots of very impressive useless stuff, until some little piece of tech filters its way down and revolutionizes part of an industry. For example, lots of sceners now are bringing things like procedural generation of art assets to the masses, but it's been a common technique in the…
That generalizes well to any exercise in restraint contributing valuable approaches to the issues it highlights.
Re: Twenty years later I wrote a Tetris again
#28"One night in May of 1996 I was bored and wanted to play Tetris very badly..." now this is how a great programming story should start :-)
"... so I connected my laptop to the internet, searched github, and within minutes I found several great implementations" ;)
"... so, keeping mind that this is 1996, I started to connect my Gateway 2000 Pentium Pro to the dial-up internet. After the fax screech, and only within a few hours, I found several great shareware implementations on usenet." ;)
Re: Twenty years later I wrote a Tetris again
#29Yes because with improved tools we are expected to do more things to achieve the same goals. Doesn't this mean we are becoming more inefficient ? I wouldn't agree with calling those tools "improved", in that case. About the size of the code: the code I wrote this time is roughly one third of the size of my original code which probably means it has less bugs and is more maintainable That neglects to consider the fact…
>That neglects to consider the fact that you are now depending on orders of magnitude more code than before, which from an overall perspective certainly doesn't mean "less bugs", and in fact could even make things more difficult to debug.
If you choose wisely your dependencies those are going to be a lot more reliable (incl. less bugs) than the code you can write in a few hours; because its code with tests, a large user base, etc.
Re: Twenty years later I wrote a Tetris again
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
"... so I connected my laptop to the internet, searched github, and within minutes I found several great implementations" ;)
"...the majority of them in node.js, so now I need to install 500MB of dependencies to play a simple game of Tetris."
"so I looked for python versions, but there were only versions of python 2.7 and my PC has installed python 3.0; after downgrading I realized this version uses the win32api, which doesn't exist in my Mac. After much frustration I went on the internet to ramble about how bad is nodeJS and JavaScript fatigue"