Merry Christmas to all the Cemetechians who celebrate the day, and happy holidays to everyone else! Final exams have finally drawn to a close for most of us in North America, so with a slightly less stifling sense of impending deadlines, I'd like to briefly glance forward at upcoming projects and milestones planned for the next few months, and leave you with the first public beta of Tetrizm, my Prizm Tetris game. Closer to the new year, I'd also like to post an overview of the year in review; unfortunately, my previous draft of the review was lost in technological failure. Real life is suddenly taking an even larger portion of my time, thanks to a very happy addition to my life on top of my existing academic and professional commitments. However, we at Cemetech still have plenty of surprises and not-so-surprises in store for you; among them:

:: With beta-testing feedback from the fine folks of Cemetech, a full 1.0 release of Tetrizm should be forthcoming
:: In a piece of news to be expanded on in a later news article, I have been working with a publisher for the past few months, and you will hopefully see a calculator-related book from me in stores late this year
:: Cemetech Contest 8 draws to a close on January 22, 2012. That means you have just under a month to finish your entries. To date we have about sixteen confirmed entries in the three categories, TI programs, Prizm programs, and computer programs. If you haven't already thought up an Arcade game to submit to the contest, please consider doing so! You get a chance at prestige and recognition, and regardless of your final ranking, you'll have a great game to share with the community.
:: With the end of TI-Forge's zContest, Sandpaper 0.8 was released, an FTP client for CALCnet capable of transferring programs between calculators locally or across the world. It has most of the framework to transfer any type of file, including groups, pictures, lists, strings, and much more, but several key chunks of code need to be added to complete these features. In addition, the ticalc.org gCn bridge currently lets calculators running Sandpaper browse the ticalc.org archives, but not yet download files directly. Once that is complete, the bridge will be expanded to work with the Cemetech archives as well.

And finally, the long-awaited beta of Tetrizm for the Prizm. You love the game of Tetris on every platform, from your computer to your GameBoy to your TI calculator, so why not enjoy it in brilliant color on your Casio Prizm calculator? Featuring fast-paced gameplay, four play modes, high score tracking, and much more, this game is sure to be a permanent addition to your Prizm. In Marathon mode, try to complete lines for as long as possible as your score and the speed increase. High Speed mode ups the ante with faster drops at lower levels. If you want to start out in a bad situation, try Touchdown mode. And to really torture yourself, see how long you can last with no line pieces in Sadistic mode. Please post feedback and bug reports in the attached topic; apologies for the hurried and very poor screenshots.

Happy holidays!

Download
[Prizm] Tetrizm Beta 1

I'm going to go try it out now Very Happy I'm sure it was worth the wait! Will be sure to post any bugs, or things about it that thrill/irk decent tetris players that I find.

EDIT: My list of things liked/needs improvement:

Liked:

:: The colors are great, nice and bright
:: The menu graphics looks very professional and well done
:: Four modes is better than one Smile
:: Highscore entries and arcade-like name entering system

Needs Improvement:

:: The rotation system is a bit quirky, IMO. For example, an I piece with your rotation system rotates right like this (the numbers represent rows/columns, 'O' represents parts of the tetrimino):


Code:

5 6 7 8
O O O O   10

rotates to

5

O     10
O     9
O     8
O     7


when the normal tetris rotation system would work more like this:


Code:

5 6 7 8
O O O O   10

rotates to

6

O     12
O     11
O     10
O     9


This is a more pressing needed improvement I think, because it makes gameplay radically different when switching to new, different rotation system from an old one.

:: In addition to that, rotating blocks very close to a wall where the piece theoretically would go through the wall after rotation does not rotate them at all, in your version. Normally, it still can rotate, but is pushed to the side after rotation.

:: Hard drops have very little debouncing. It barely leaves enough time for one to take their finger off of the Shift key in order to not had drop the next one; as a result, I made many mistakes where I accidentally hard-dropped 1-2 blocks in a row at the origin spawn location after hard dropping the intended block; therefore, I was forced to just use the more reliable yet slower soft drop.

:: scoring doesn't seem to be authentic; for example, I got <50 points for a tetris on level 1, which seems abnormally small of a reward. I didn't notice, but I'm also wondering, is a tetris just worth 4 lines of points, or worth more? (it generally is supposed to be worth quite a bit more)


Personally Wanted Additional Features:

:: Ghost pieces
:: Holds (I will definitely understand if you don't implement it, as it would require a decent about of change to your HUD/UI)
:: Auto-Hard-Drop Mode (AKA, Arika TGM mode, the mode of grandmasters Cool) (maybe farfetched of a request, though)
:: A "Piece Bag" piece generation system. I noticed that you were just using a pseudorandom number generator for determining the type of dropped piece; a more modern approach is to make sure that all pieces have equal chances of being picked, but once one is picked, it cannot be picked again until all other of the 7 types have been picked. It allows for more strategy and better prediction of possible pieces to come, along with the assurance your strategic setup won't be ruined by a constant stream of S and Z pieces Razz



Overall, very nice demo, some things I would personally like to see changed (of course, if you want to change them), and some things that should stay the same Very Happy Awesome work, Kerm.
good game,

old times when I played Tetris on a console 9999 in 1 Smile

I will leave a suggestion: create the pause feature
Happy Holidays indeed. Sucks I can't try out tetrizm, as I happen to lack a Prizm (not cool enough)
Very nice game, with beautiful colors and graphics.
In my opinion, it's one of the best Prizm games.

However, i didn't manage to enter my name at the end.
I can only press EXE, and write AAA.

You should also add an option to chose sensibility.
Currently i think that the sensibility is a bit hight, it's difficult to play.
Happy holidays, and I'll try this when I get home Smile The game looks really nice, and reminds me that I need to work on my Prizm game for the contest.
I just noticed another minor thing, probably that would be found under the "Needs Improvement" list: you can't slide pieces once they hit the bottom in your version. In most versions, you get enough time to slide the piece back and forth a few positions once it hits the bottom, so that you can fix small holes here and there that are concave. Perhaps you can add a small window of movement once the tetrimino hits the bottom (the delay should be the same amount of time as it takes for the block to drop one row while it is free falling)


Also, regarding one of my "requests",

Quote:
:: A "Piece Bag" piece generation system. I noticed that you were just using a pseudorandom number generator for determining the type of dropped piece; a more modern approach is to make sure that all pieces have equal chances of being picked, but once one is picked, it cannot be picked again until all other of the 7 types have been picked. It allows for more strategy and better prediction of possible pieces to come, along with the assurance your strategic setup won't be ruined by a constant stream of S and Z pieces


To further explain this concept in further detail, I shall throw you this quite informative link Smile http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Generator
Helder: I agree that a pause feature would be good; any suggested key for it?
Ashbad:
- Working on rotation
- Fixed scoring
- Fixed hard-drop debouncing
- That sliding should already be there if you soft-drop or don't force-drop at all. It seems to be on my calculator, anyway Smile
- That piece bag thing seems like it would make things too easy to me, but maybe I'm just not a hardcore enough Tetris player. Razz
KermMartian wrote:
- That sliding should already be there if you soft-drop or don't force-drop at all. It seems to be on my calculator, anyway Smile
- That piece bag thing seems like it would make things too easy to me, but maybe I'm just not a hardcore enough Tetris player. Razz


Sliding: o rly? Maybe I just didn't soft drop my test for it correctly.

Piece Bag: It *does* make it easier, but it also makes it a lot more possible Smile it becomes more strategy based, rather than founded on luck and guessing on which piece will come next. It also prevents the infamous S and Z indefinite gamplay-inhibiting problem, which I have already encountered in your version (I actually got a highly rare sequence of 7 S pieces in a row, which ended my game after only sending ~60 lines Razz)

Others: Awesome work, this game is going to be great! Smile

EDIT: for my opinion on a pause button, maybe the button right next to the shift key (OPTN) or the Alpha key would work?
Cool to see a release of this Smile. I'm gonna try this when I come back from shopping.
Ashbad: Implemented piece-bag randomization for all modes except Sadistic, which still uses full randomization with no line pieces for extra sadism. With that and the new tweaks with scoring and hard-drop debouncing, I got 21,901 at Level 28 in Marathon without really trying. Smile
KermMartian wrote:
Ashbad: Implemented piece-bag randomization for all modes except Sadistic, which still uses full randomization with no line pieces for extra sadism. With that and the new tweaks with scoring and hard-drop debouncing, I got 21,901 at Level 28 in Marathon without really trying. Smile


Sounds absolutely awesome Very Happy this is just going to be great.
Thanks, Ashbad. Smile I've now implemented rotation fixes as well, and I think it feels significantly more polished thanks to your suggestions. Everyone (including Ashbad): please try out Tetrizm Beta 2:

Download:
[Prizm] Tetrizm Beta 2
Just tried it out, and it's very, very polished now, quite fun to play Very Happy one small thing I noticed: every game, including Sadistic, starts off with its first piece being a I piece, if you play more than one game in a row.

I'll post more things when I get home form a movie, but all of these will be "Requests", not "Needs Improvements". Truly awesome work Smile
I noticed that same glitch, and just fixed it. The other thing I wanted to do was perhaps make the level increase a bit more graphical, still toying with that.
There were some things in the first beta that didn't really feel right, but I couldn't notice what they were. Luckily, beta 2 fixed almost all of those. One small issue that remains is that a piece will not rotate if it's in a certain position and is next to a wall. There also seems to be a small typo on the main screen. MENU is the key that exits the game, not MODE.
Beta 2 didn't fix the rotation issue? Which piece will not rotate, and against which wall? Thanks for catching that typo.
It's really fun. When I tried Sadistic mode, the first piece it gave me was the line piece, followed by a bunch of T pieces in a row, then it alternated the purple L and the T piece back and forth and then it became random.

But I'm assuming the first piece being the line piece is normal.
graphmastur wrote:
It's really fun. When I tried Sadistic mode, the first piece it gave me was the line piece, followed by a bunch of T pieces in a row, then it alternated the purple L and the T piece back and forth and then it became random.

But I'm assuming the first piece being the line piece is normal.


Ashbad wrote:
one small thing I noticed: every game, including Sadistic, starts off with its first piece being a I piece, if you play more than one game in a row.


KermMartian wrote:
I noticed that same glitch, and just fixed it. The other thing I wanted to do was perhaps make the level increase a bit more graphical, still toying with that.
This mode (which I suggested before, but could not remember the game name until now due to crappy Omni search) would definitively be a good addition to this game. It's even more sadistical than the sadistical mode in Tetrizm. Razz

http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastet.html
  
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