Tetris guideline needed

Thread in 'Discussion' started by Mountainrunner, 27 Sep 2006.

  1. Mountainrunner

    Mountainrunner Unregistered

    Hello.


    Can anyone please tell me where I can get the official tetris game guidelines?


    I'm writing my own tetris-clone, and would like to keep the gameplay as original as possible.


    Next point is that www.tetris.com seems to be down since months or years.

    I would like to ask them if I run into big problems when I call my game Tetris.


    The other possibility would be calling the game x-tris.



    Thanks a lot, Thomas
     
  2. The guideline documents are not available to the general public. One can only deduce them from the behavior of compliant games, although the behavior of compliant games can vary slightly from game to game.


    Also, judging from past incidents, including "-tris" in the name appears to be considered enough similarity to trigger a trademark infringement complaint.
     
  3. Tepples is the expert here, but I wouldn't suggest using '-tris', nor mentioning Tetris at all in the whole game, or anything related to the game.


    There's a systems guide to Tetris DS here. It's got a pretty large amount of depth with respect to rotations. Apart from the stuff in the guide, I don't know what you might want.
     
  4. tepples

    tepples Lockjaw developer

    "Tetris" is flagrant trademark in fringement, and "x-tris" is likely too similar to the trademark, but "Shape Mountain" isn't. Something like "Compare to Tetris" is nominative use in at least the USA, in the same way that boxes of generic ibuprofen pain reliever state "Compare to Motrin IB", as long as you do nothing that suggests any sponsorship or endorsement by The Tetris Company.


    As for the Guideline, everything we know about it is on the wiki, especially in articles linked from [[Tetris Guideline]]. My own game LOCKJAW began as a reference implementation of the publicly known parts of the Guideline, and still defaults to Guideline behavior out of the box, but now encompasses plenty of variations that can be turned on and off through its Options menu.
     
  5. Mountainrunner

    Mountainrunner Unregistered

    Thanks for all replies so far, at the moment it's only a project but needs to be finished this year until x-mas.


    Shape Mountain sounds nice. [​IMG]


    Next issue is that I try to copy the gameplay as exactly as possible from the examples I own:


    Which are the original Tetris and Tetris DX on the game-boy.


    Comparing the gameplay (classic and marathon) I've noticed that the movement in Tetris DX is much more sensitive than in the original Tetris.


    Besides: The original Tetris (DMG-TR-USA) is colored on my game-boy color. I thought it should be black and white only ...


    OK, fore sure in the next weeks I'll have some other questions, for example about such terms as "T-spin double" which happen in the game-play.


    Thanks to all, Thomas
     
  6. tepples

    tepples Lockjaw developer

    Thanks.

    Both Game Boy games are pre-Guideline. The GBA game that most closely fits the Guideline is Tetris Worlds.

    That's called delayed auto shift (DAS), and it varies widely even on Guideline-conforming games. TGM3: Terror Instinct is much faster than Tetris DS for example.

    In monochrome games, Game Boy Color is capable of setting up one four-color palette for the background and two three-color palettes for sprites.

    See Twists.
     
  7. Mountainrunner

    Mountainrunner Unregistered


    Ah!

    On my game-boy this move isn't possible, so while watching Tetris-gameplays on youtube.com I wondered how they managed to move the tile this (mechanical impossible) way.


    For sure I don't want to add this movement, first at all the game has to run and later we will see if I do another version.


    ---


    Maybe someone can explain me what's wrong with the random-generator.

    I've read something about this generator that it wouldn't not really be random (interrupted long s and z-series).


    -- Thomas
     
  8. tepples

    tepples Lockjaw developer

    Here are previous discussion and a wiki article about the "Random Generator", a name that a purported BPS employee has used publicly to describe a randomizer that deals tetrominoes a set of 7 at a time.


    Colour_thief likes to call this algorithm "SZSZ" because a sequence of three "snake" tetrominoes (S or Z) appears roughly once for every 257 pieces in the Random Generator. He prefers Arika's tetromino games, which use a different randomizer that strongly discourages repetition of recent tetrominoes. But the so-called "SZSZ" of Random Generator is just that: three or four "snake" shaped pieces (S tetromino or Z tetromino) in a row, nothing more. It's SZSZ, not SZSZSZSZ.
     

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