I don't actually find the game that funny, but I laughed when I saw Google Ads advertising Neave Tetris on that page.
Well, I leave my computer on at work all the time, so. here's the result. yay. admittedly i could have done better (i.e. more instances to completely fill the scoreboard) but eh. edit: okay, so apparently you can just hit the back button on your browser and resubmit the same score under a different name. wheeeeee
INTRODUCTION Okay, so 1D Tetris is a joke. Hurr. But couldn't there be a really working puzzle game which amounts to something like Tetris with line width = 1? Of course, something will have to be different: Imagine the falling pieces consist of 4 colored segments. Get 4 segments of the same color together and they disappear. Or something like that. SEE, JUST LIKE TETRIS Now let's make this as close as possible to Tetris: 1. Rotation The player can rotate the falling piece, that is vertically mirror the order of the colored segments by pushing the rotate button. (I thought about inverting or rotating like in columns but I think to vertical mirror is the closest to the spirit of Tetris. On the other hand, flipping gives maybe to little control and columns-style rotation will work out better.) 2. Locked Piece Just like in the newer versions of 2D-Tetris, a button is used to switch the falling piece with a stored piece. 2. Accelerated Dropping Again, this works similar to 2D-Tetris in that it lets the piece drop faster. COMBOS AND STUFF Even the oldest versions of Tetris give more points for deleting more stuff at once than in succession. 4 lines deleted at once with the same piece return more points than 4 single line deletions. How to implement something like big deletions? Well, imagine that 4 times the same color together is needed for a deletion, and you have a stack that looks like this: black black black white Now, an incoming piece with 1 black at the bottom is enough to get 4 black segments together and disappear. But an incoming piece could have 2 or 3 black segments at the bottom or consist of only black segments. So the game has the possibility of deleting 4 to 7 segments of the same color at once. There could also be gravity combos. Imagine a stack that looks like this: black black white white From the top falls a piece that looks just like what is in your stack. black black white white black black white white You flip the piece: white white black black black black white white They come together: white white black black black black white white The 4 black segments that touch each other disappear: white white ----- ----- ----- ----- white white Now comes gravity: white white white white So the white segments also disappear: ----- ----- ----- ----- Should gravity come instantly or with a delay? I Dunno. Or there could be yet another way: Holes in the stack are closed by dropping a piece on the stack with the acceleration button. Like in fancier versions of 2D-Tetris, there could be 2 buttons for accelerated dropping: One that drops the piece instantly and one that moves the piece only faster than normal. The instant-dropper closes all holes. The other one only closes holes as long as it is pushed down. So I don't know what exactly would be the best way to make a serious 1D Tetris, but I believe it is possible to make an actual game out of these rough ideas through prototyping a lot and that such a game could be played by a blind person if there are enough audio cues. Maybe a horizontal stage can make better use of stereo effects than a vertical one. So, who would like to program something like this as Open Source for no money? =)
