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Playable Demo: Link on itch.io
Presenting BLOCKBUSTER … hand drawn with love (except the axolotl, sue me… but please don’t)
Play Tetri.. um, play a totally original block buster game and guess names of Hollywood movies. You will get hints about the movie along the way.
Final progress update post. I have come too far. What started as a humble attempt at recreating Tetris took over my nights and weekends. First I was obsessed with perfecting the core game mechanics of Tetris. It was tough, it took me into tetris.wiki rabbithole. And I finally did it. I implemented wall-kicks, created sticky line-clears, satisfying block clearning animation. Life was good.
But I had to go further, I had to add my own twist to the classic game. So I did. On a whim, I decided to mash hangman style hollywood movie guessing game with Tetris. The idea was simple: as you clear lines, you get hints about a Hollywood movie, and you have to type the name of the movie to clear the level. I took a break from code, picked up my ipad and made use of Procreate that I had bought years ago but never really used. I hand drew all the assets in a steampunk style on blueprint paper. It took a lot of time, but I loved every minute of it.
I knew I was making a cardinal sin. I was interupting the “Tetris flow” state and adding cognitive dissonance for the player who has to now guess a movie instead of playing Tetris. But I was already in too deep. The challenge was to make the typing mechanic work well with the core Tetris mechanics. I had to pause the falling blocks when the player was typing, and resume when they were not. I had to give feedback on correct and incorrect letters, and also manage edge cases like backspace, spaces, and punctuation. After many iterations, I finally got it to work smoothly.
But something was still missing. There was no feedback, the hints revealed were not intuitive enough. So I invested a week more in learning how to create movement and animations. I add to be resourceful, use the same hand drawn stuff and scale, rotate, or shake parts of the drawing. It’s not exactly The Last of Us, but it’s honest work. In all of this I had forgotten to build basic HUD stuff. So I spend another week adding a scoring system, creating rounds and levels progression.
I also learned along the way that the corporate that owns the Tetris IP (one who shall not be named) for the original game is highly litigious. Saw a film about it. I like to live on the edge, between cease & desist.
If you have feedback and suggestions, do share. I will not work on them for this game. This is behind me now. But good to get feedback since this was my first game ever.
PS: Added a Sassy Mode that is activated by typing A S S anytime. Typing the reverse S S A turns it off. In Sassy Mode, instead of a plot summary, you get a poorly described plot summary for the movie.
Total Time spent: 85 hours.