Great game! I have to agree that a “game over” would be nice.
I noticed a bug: ghost, sash, and shake options do not save when you quit the game. I find shake distracting but I have to remember to turn it off every time I launch the game.
Only other thought is I’d love an easier difficulty: the fall speed goes up really quickly and I’m not very good at Tetris lol.
Great work, I’m definitely going to play this a lot.
This is awesome! super responsive and fun to play! One issue I keep running into is the game just randomly resets back to level 1 and 0 points even when I am nowhere close to losing. Not sure why, but this has happened multiple times.
thank you so much for this! i’m a tetris addict and it’s great to have a version (other than the touchscreen mobile version lol) that i can take with me anywhere. there are two things i feel aren’t optimal but they might just be due to my playstyle and totally subjective, but i’ll make the suggestions anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1. i feel like the pieces lock into place way too quickly compared to other versions i’ve played and it makes it extremely hard to slide pieces into place/do kicks etc.
2. once you get close to the top of the screen the pieces seem to drop exponentially faster, making it really hard to recover if you’re stacking high. if i misdrop more than halfway up the screen it’s almost impossible for me to come back from it bc the pieces start dropping at lightning speed
like i said these may be totally subjective, i’m assuming you’re going more for retro-style tetris and i’m way more comfortable playing guideline (99, tetrio, etc.) but other than those things this is a fantastic port! thank you again :)
Thanks for playing! Can you confirm whether or not you're on the latest version (1.7.0)? We added lock delay in that version which is related to #1, but it has some issues to be worked out. For #2, yeah I'm not sure if that is just your perception or a true issue. It absolutely could be. We plan to add more rows because it's a couple rows too short, and can check for weirdness in the code at that time.
ooh nope, I was on 1.6.0! I’ll update it now :) I was still able to pull off a couple t-spins in 1.6 but it wasn’t easy haha. as for #2 it could definitely just be me bc every version plays different and I play a lot more multiplayer than marathon
Whenever you get a Playtris or an All-Clear (or a T-Spin in the next update- whoops leak), the thing that appears at the bottom-left corner is the sash.
Absolutely wearing my Playdate out playing this game! Something about Playdate makes this game even more addicting.
If I could ask for any addition... HIGH SCORES!
After you lose a round, a screen appears and displays the score you just reached above a list of the top 10 (or however many) scores. Big plus if you can enter a 3 (or however many) character nickname.
In the options menu you could have an option for "Quick Restart" or something that lets you play the game as it is now where a new game starts immediately after you lose. Could also have a button on the pause menu to look at the High Scores list at any time.
Just my suggestions, I appreciate that you brought this title to the Playdate at all! Thanks, ThaCuber!
+1 for something like this. I don’t like the way you just autostart a new game immediately. I actually never know what score I achieved because I’m not watching the score while playing. Then when the game is over, it’s gone! I don’t care if it’s a high score list, but there should at least be a Game Over screen at the end.
Well, the biggest highscore you got shows after you lose, over in the "Highscore" thing at the corner. But yeah, I might have to make a kind of Game Over screen...
Just realized, the main.lua file is already 1200+ lines long, I need to split it up already xd
I think there might be a bug in the latest version, where when moving a piece left or right, occasionally an input won't work, like it drops a frame or something. Hopefully that's a helpful explanation, I can probably try to make a video if it's not helpful
From playing a lot of other people trying to make Tetris clones, it's so hard to pull of the feel of the official releases. But you nailed it. Between the board shake, the controls, it's so rad. I keep returning to it over and over.
This game is so good and fun. Thanks for making it and improving it steadily. I have a few suggestions:
1. When you enter the Options screen, the Playdate B button should close it and go back to the game. That’s how the system “options” panel works, and I think it’s how Playtris’s in-game options screen should too. Then you can get rid of the “Continue” item at the top.
2. It wasn’t clear to me at first that Music and Sound were sliders. I suggest making them look more like the system volume control.
3. I don’t care to play with the Ghost option enabled, but I do wish there was some indication of where your piece would fall if you dropped it now. I’ve seen some Tetris games where there is a sort of underline under the game board that just shows which columns the current piece occupies.
4. Perhaps it’s just my eyesight, but I can’t see why “Big Blocks” is not the one and only size. With vertical space at a premium on Playdate, why not make the game board (and pieces) Big Block size?
#4 as it is right now you actually get less than the desired standard of 20 rows on screen with big blocks. There may be a happy medium in the future (edit: misspoke a bit as we always have 18 lines but were discussing possibly increasing that)
PS I can't believe this was your first comment on itch, welcome!
One thing you might consider is letting users drop their own background music in. Playdate can play MP3 files natively, by the user sideloading the file into the data folder for the app. Check out Audition for an example of this. That way, users could add a MP3 of the Gameboy music for Tetris, and get you out of any copyright issues.
Awesome game. It's a lot of fun and has some of the best Tetris quality of life additions. If I were to update the game at all it would be to reduce the screen shake and reduce the large black banner at the top of the screen when scoring a Tetris. Thanks for the hard work.
Thanks for making this game. I like it a lot. Feature request, can you copy the art style of the gameboy tetrominos or apply some pattern to the blocks? I keep getting confused between the "L" and "J" blocks when they are all the same 1 bit.
You're awesome, the game is awesome, the updates are awesome and the those updates included more than I could have possibly wanted in a super short amount of time. Thank you! You're the best!
Hold and shadow are major improvements, and the home menu card looks fantastic. This is now a really polished looking release. One suggestion... I had the crank open when I first launched the game and thought that the update had broken A+B button rotation. I recommend adding a note to the game description explaining that the A+B button requires the crank to be closed (or enable them to work with it open, but that's more work)
Hey! Game is working great via sideloading but seems to have a couple issues via website uploading. First error I had was something with a `buildVersion` being missing from the pdxinfo file preventing the upload completely. I fixed that quick in my editor and uploaded it with no issue but after downloading and running it, started getting some error logging! Looking forward to any future updates you might have planned and hope you might be able to fix this so I can keep messing around with it via website uploading :D
Heyo? Can you send me the error that appeared so i might be able to fix it? Also as far as I am aware you should not mess up with the buildNumber field, as the sdk docs say:
Ah, yeah, sorry, buildNumber was the field. It seems like this issue on the website is problem with a lot of games so it might be something with their uploader and not your game because a lot of the other games I've tried to upload via the site have given me this error. Here is the error message on their site just in case it helps you at all
EDIT: looking at the SDK docs, it is a bit misleading since it seems to state that you can leave out that value but the website seems to think that you can't, haha!
Looking around online, it seems like this is something that just started happening today. Seeing a lot of comments around within the past 24 hours regarding people having this problem :P So likely a bug/issue on Playdate's end and not with your game!
One of the combo sounds didn't seem to load properly. It can't be my problem since i doublechecked that the directories and the files exist and they all do.
I tried a couple times through the playdate website and got the same error each time. Maybe it's an issue with their system. Seems like the kind of thing that might happen with case-sensitivity or special characters in the filename... I was able to load the game using the simulator's "upload to device" feature, beautiful game :)
Works awesome on my playdate, it’s probably my favorite game on my device right now!
If there were any features I’d like to see in the future, I’d say maybe some shading below a block to indicate where it would fall / an outline of that block at the bottom so you can avoid misplacing your drops quite as often. I also found that you can’t spin the pieces very well at the edges of the screen, making some maneuvers kinda tricky.
But man, those are just some nitpicks for things I’d hope to see changed in the future. I’m a big fan of what we’ve already got, and I really appreciate your work making this possible at all. Thanks so much for making this
And thank you so much for playing it! You know, I've never expected this game to be this known, I didn't even mean to release it as a full game, but now that I did I'm getting a lot of good feedback. You don't know how much I appreciate it.
Also, yes, I got asked for the ghost piece feature already, will implement, if I had a penny for every time I missed a hole XD
So great, though does it really bounce like that when you drop pieces, or is there the option to turn that off? Also, the only song this needs is the original Game Boy Tetris theme, Korobeiniki.
Korobeiniki is a Russian folk song from the mid-1800s. Tetris holds the trademark for the specific arrangement of the song that they created for the 1989 Game Boy version of Tetris, but the melody itself is in the public domain. If you can find a freely-licensed performance of the song that isn't based on Tetris' arrangement, you can freely use it in your game.
Or you could try to find some other music that has a similar feel to the A-B-C songs on GB Tetris. Something like Understanding It by Cabel Sasser (I'm not sure Cabel would let you use that actual piece, because they use it as the ending music for the Panic Podcast). Something with that kind of upbeat style would be a perfect fit for Playtris. Whatever you use, you'll need to make it loop somehow.
This RULES, elegant and plays perfectly. Would be cool to use the crank to rotate the pieces, and maybe some sort of effect when a line is destroyed. Also let me know if you want some music for this one, be happy to provide some vibe-y beats or something, this will be played a lot by me xD
Thanks! Using the crank to rotate the pieces will be easy to program. And an effect for when a line is destroyed shouldn't be that hard right? And for the music, don't worry, I can make some myself, I've made music before.
Okay, fixed. Apparently I forgot to put in the name, author, description and version of the game in the pdxinfo file, since I've been told in the Playdate Squad server that you need those fields for the Playdate website to make sense of your game. I added them already, try downloading the game from your account now.
Please note that the game now looks different than the version you downloaded, I changed the ending sequence for something different since i was also reported that it lagged the console too much.
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Great game! I have to agree that a “game over” would be nice.
I noticed a bug: ghost, sash, and shake options do not save when you quit the game. I find shake distracting but I have to remember to turn it off every time I launch the game.
Only other thought is I’d love an easier difficulty: the fall speed goes up really quickly and I’m not very good at Tetris lol.
Great work, I’m definitely going to play this a lot.
Here's two gifs of the the hold piece bug
This is awesome! super responsive and fun to play! One issue I keep running into is the game just randomly resets back to level 1 and 0 points even when I am nowhere close to losing. Not sure why, but this has happened multiple times.
Oof, are you playing on a device or simulator?
on the actual device. Haven't played it too long on the simulator so not sure if it also happens there.
i have a video of the bug, but not quite sure how best to share it with you.
Appreciate the response- if you don't want to upload to a service like YouTube, you can try www.veed.io which doesn't require an account. Thanks!
https://www.veed.io/view/b29989be-1241-4af4-91b1-586f8d884574 here is the uploaded video. You can just look at the last 10 seconds or so. Hopefully this helps!
If you've decided to share the source anywhere, I'd love to take a look at it.
Wow, we definitely need to add this prominently somewhere... we are very interested in more collaborators!!
https://github.com/ThaCuber/Playtris
Wow. Incredible. Thanks so much. I wanted to poke around and make some little features to help me learn/improve at Tetris.
Maybe include a message about the project/source in the actual game somewhere? Is there a credits menu page somewhere in the game? Just a thought.
Love those ideas, thanks!
thank you so much for this! i’m a tetris addict and it’s great to have a version (other than the touchscreen mobile version lol) that i can take with me anywhere. there are two things i feel aren’t optimal but they might just be due to my playstyle and totally subjective, but i’ll make the suggestions anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1. i feel like the pieces lock into place way too quickly compared to other versions i’ve played and it makes it extremely hard to slide pieces into place/do kicks etc.
2. once you get close to the top of the screen the pieces seem to drop exponentially faster, making it really hard to recover if you’re stacking high. if i misdrop more than halfway up the screen it’s almost impossible for me to come back from it bc the pieces start dropping at lightning speed
like i said these may be totally subjective, i’m assuming you’re going more for retro-style tetris and i’m way more comfortable playing guideline (99, tetrio, etc.) but other than those things this is a fantastic port! thank you again :)
Thanks for playing! Can you confirm whether or not you're on the latest version (1.7.0)? We added lock delay in that version which is related to #1, but it has some issues to be worked out. For #2, yeah I'm not sure if that is just your perception or a true issue. It absolutely could be. We plan to add more rows because it's a couple rows too short, and can check for weirdness in the code at that time.
ooh nope, I was on 1.6.0! I’ll update it now :) I was still able to pull off a couple t-spins in 1.6 but it wasn’t easy haha. as for #2 it could definitely just be me bc every version plays different and I play a lot more multiplayer than marathon
Great implementation! Question: What does the "Sash" option do?
Whenever you get a Playtris or an All-Clear (or a T-Spin in the next update- whoops leak), the thing that appears at the bottom-left corner is the sash.
Absolutely wearing my Playdate out playing this game! Something about Playdate makes this game even more addicting.
If I could ask for any addition... HIGH SCORES!
After you lose a round, a screen appears and displays the score you just reached above a list of the top 10 (or however many) scores. Big plus if you can enter a 3 (or however many) character nickname.
In the options menu you could have an option for "Quick Restart" or something that lets you play the game as it is now where a new game starts immediately after you lose. Could also have a button on the pause menu to look at the High Scores list at any time.
Just my suggestions, I appreciate that you brought this title to the Playdate at all! Thanks, ThaCuber!
+1 for something like this. I don’t like the way you just autostart a new game immediately. I actually never know what score I achieved because I’m not watching the score while playing. Then when the game is over, it’s gone! I don’t care if it’s a high score list, but there should at least be a Game Over screen at the end.
Well, the biggest highscore you got shows after you lose, over in the "Highscore" thing at the corner. But yeah, I might have to make a kind of Game Over screen...
Just realized, the main.lua file is already 1200+ lines long, I need to split it up already xd
I think there might be a bug in the latest version, where when moving a piece left or right, occasionally an input won't work, like it drops a frame or something. Hopefully that's a helpful explanation, I can probably try to make a video if it's not helpful
Yeah, I know, will be fixed on 1.6.
Thanks for making a video on the game! And also thank god you didn't play 1.5 😅
This game is so good and fun. Thanks for making it and improving it steadily. I have a few suggestions:
1. When you enter the Options screen, the Playdate B button should close it and go back to the game. That’s how the system “options” panel works, and I think it’s how Playtris’s in-game options screen should too. Then you can get rid of the “Continue” item at the top.
2. It wasn’t clear to me at first that Music and Sound were sliders. I suggest making them look more like the system volume control.
3. I don’t care to play with the Ghost option enabled, but I do wish there was some indication of where your piece would fall if you dropped it now. I’ve seen some Tetris games where there is a sort of underline under the game board that just shows which columns the current piece occupies.
4. Perhaps it’s just my eyesight, but I can’t see why “Big Blocks” is not the one and only size. With vertical space at a premium on Playdate, why not make the game board (and pieces) Big Block size?
Hi John,
#1 already merged in for the next release :)
#2 & #3 thanks for the suggestions!
#4 as it is right now you actually get less than the desired standard of 20 rows on screen with big blocks. There may be a happy medium in the future (edit: misspoke a bit as we always have 18 lines but were discussing possibly increasing that)
PS I can't believe this was your first comment on itch, welcome!
Anyone else experience stutters in the game? It just like... hiccups every 10 seconds or so and often causes me to misplace pieces.
Yeah, been reported of that in Discord. I'll remove the BGM for now, I think that might be the issue.
One thing you might consider is letting users drop their own background music in. Playdate can play MP3 files natively, by the user sideloading the file into the data folder for the app. Check out Audition for an example of this. That way, users could add a MP3 of the Gameboy music for Tetris, and get you out of any copyright issues.
Awesome game. It's a lot of fun and has some of the best Tetris quality of life additions. If I were to update the game at all it would be to reduce the screen shake and reduce the large black banner at the top of the screen when scoring a Tetris. Thanks for the hard work.
And thanks to you for playing it! For the screen shake reduction idea I might have to add a new menu item type, "slider"
And if I do I'll also remove the shake crossmark, since you can now slide the slider (redundancy) to 0 to completely deactivate shake
I'm in love. This is straight up the game I judge a new console by. And you've made something really, really nice and very playable. Thank you!
Thank you too for playing it!
Thanks for making this game. I like it a lot. Feature request, can you copy the art style of the gameboy tetrominos or apply some pattern to the blocks? I keep getting confused between the "L" and "J" blocks when they are all the same 1 bit.
Sure!
I didn't do it in this version cuz idk what pattern to add 💀
You're awesome, the game is awesome, the updates are awesome and the those updates included more than I could have possibly wanted in a super short amount of time. Thank you! You're the best!
Damn, no problem! Thanks to you for playing my game!
Hold and shadow are major improvements, and the home menu card looks fantastic. This is now a really polished looking release.
One suggestion... I had the crank open when I first launched the game and thought that the update had broken A+B button rotation. I recommend adding a note to the game description explaining that the A+B button requires the crank to be closed (or enable them to work with it open, but that's more work)
It's not really that much work, heck it's just a matter of changing two if statements' conditions! But yeah, I do need to explain it.
I actually ended up changing it completely lmao
Hey! Game is working great via sideloading but seems to have a couple issues via website uploading. First error I had was something with a `buildVersion` being missing from the pdxinfo file preventing the upload completely. I fixed that quick in my editor and uploaded it with no issue but after downloading and running it, started getting some error logging! Looking forward to any future updates you might have planned and hope you might be able to fix this so I can keep messing around with it via website uploading :D
Heyo? Can you send me the error that appeared so i might be able to fix it? Also as far as I am aware you should not mess up with the buildNumber field, as the sdk docs say:![]()
Ah, yeah, sorry, buildNumber was the field. It seems like this issue on the website is problem with a lot of games so it might be something with their uploader and not your game because a lot of the other games I've tried to upload via the site have given me this error. Here is the error message on their site just in case it helps you at all
EDIT: looking at the SDK docs, it is a bit misleading since it seems to state that you can leave out that value but the website seems to think that you can't, haha!
Looking around online, it seems like this is something that just started happening today. Seeing a lot of comments around within the past 24 hours regarding people having this problem :P So likely a bug/issue on Playdate's end and not with your game!
Yeah I also saw... Thank god I didn't miss anything.
I had the exact same 2 problems. The error I got on device (which crashed the device) was:
main.lua:164: file assets/sounds/combo1 not found: unknown uC-FS error: 0710
stack traceback:
[C]: in function 'assert'
main.lua:164: in function 'loadSound'
main.lua: 169: in main chunk
One of the combo sounds didn't seem to load properly. It can't be my problem since i doublechecked that the directories and the files exist and they all do.
I tried a couple times through the playdate website and got the same error each time. Maybe it's an issue with their system. Seems like the kind of thing that might happen with case-sensitivity or special characters in the filename... I was able to load the game using the simulator's "upload to device" feature, beautiful game :)
Love Playtris!! Great work! I used it in my newest video where I show how to sideload Playdate games from an iPhone.
Thanks! Also dang, sideloading games from iPhone?? I thought you could only sideload on PC! Again, can't confirm that cause I don't have a Playdate...
Yup, both methods of sideloading work on the iPhone (and undoubtably Android) just like they do on a desktop computer.
will try this out soon. Great store style match.
Works awesome on my playdate, it’s probably my favorite game on my device right now!
If there were any features I’d like to see in the future, I’d say maybe some shading below a block to indicate where it would fall / an outline of that block at the bottom so you can avoid misplacing your drops quite as often. I also found that you can’t spin the pieces very well at the edges of the screen, making some maneuvers kinda tricky.
But man, those are just some nitpicks for things I’d hope to see changed in the future. I’m a big fan of what we’ve already got, and I really appreciate your work making this possible at all. Thanks so much for making this
And thank you so much for playing it! You know, I've never expected this game to be this known, I didn't even mean to release it as a full game, but now that I did I'm getting a lot of good feedback. You don't know how much I appreciate it.
Also, yes, I got asked for the ghost piece feature already, will implement, if I had a penny for every time I missed a hole XD
So great, though does it really bounce like that when you drop pieces, or is there the option to turn that off? Also, the only song this needs is the original Game Boy Tetris theme, Korobeiniki.
Yeah, you can toggle the shake in the system menu.
And for the original Game Boy Tetris song, I'm not sure, don't wanna get a C&D from The Tetris Company /j
Korobeiniki is a Russian folk song from the mid-1800s. Tetris holds the trademark for the specific arrangement of the song that they created for the 1989 Game Boy version of Tetris, but the melody itself is in the public domain. If you can find a freely-licensed performance of the song that isn't based on Tetris' arrangement, you can freely use it in your game.
Or you could try to find some other music that has a similar feel to the A-B-C songs on GB Tetris. Something like Understanding It by Cabel Sasser (I'm not sure Cabel would let you use that actual piece, because they use it as the ending music for the Panic Podcast). Something with that kind of upbeat style would be a perfect fit for Playtris. Whatever you use, you'll need to make it loop somehow.
--cmmartti (frosted-flakes on Discord)
Oh, okay then
also hi frosted-flakes
This RULES, elegant and plays perfectly. Would be cool to use the crank to rotate the pieces, and maybe some sort of effect when a line is destroyed. Also let me know if you want some music for this one, be happy to provide some vibe-y beats or something, this will be played a lot by me xD
Thanks! Using the crank to rotate the pieces will be easy to program. And an effect for when a line is destroyed shouldn't be that hard right? And for the music, don't worry, I can make some myself, I've made music before.
Awesome, can't wait to see future updates!!!
Works via sideloading, but needs an update to work uploading from playdate website.
Okay, fixed. Apparently I forgot to put in the name, author, description and version of the game in the pdxinfo file, since I've been told in the Playdate Squad server that you need those fields for the Playdate website to make sense of your game. I added them already, try downloading the game from your account now.
Please note that the game now looks different than the version you downloaded, I changed the ending sequence for something different since i was also reported that it lagged the console too much.