It woudl have many many modes of play. the following are what I would consider a bare minimum. 1) The "old school' mode. Problem is, there are 3 definitive "old school' variants of tetris. They are a) PC Tetris by spectrum Holobyte. 1 rotation direction, no soft drop, toggleable piece preview. select starting level, and garbage amount. b) Nintendo tetris, as exemplified by NES tetris and Game Boy Tetris. Slow DAS, long line clear, two rotate buttons. The introduction of B-Type. c) sega tetris. Deterministic randomiser, lock delay, slow/fast/slow/fast speed curve, entry delay. The "power on pattern". Ceiling rotate restriction. The definitive tetris game would have all THREE old school modes. Tetris, the way it was back in the day. Everythign that was good and everything that was bad. these three will have the world covered for their old school tetris fix. 2) It should have the modern versions of those classic games. Tetris Worlds is the modern PC tetris. A faithful replica of that game should be included. This covers the next tetris, the new tetris (square mode) and cascade. Possibly some stuff from elements too, but the core of modern PC tetris is tetris worlds. The TGM series is the modern version of Sega tetris. A mode based on IT should be included. TGM3 includes most of the sega tetris legacy, and this is the game that should be emulated. Tetris DS is the modern version of Nintendo style tetris. Modes pattered around those present in that game should be included. Push mode, simple 40 line/ultra/sprint/etc. Finally something new needs to be added. I would add the following new things to the game. 1) Neo classical tetris. This would be your old school style 10 lines per level game, but with the following features. a) SRS without infinity. step reset, with limited floorkick reset. b) 3 piece preview and hold. c) 7 piece bag, but with a catch. the first bag will be a random partial bag from 1 to pieces in it, to interfere with playing forever. 2) beginner mode. Similar to neo classical, except infinity is turned on, speed curve i slowered, and it end s at 100 lines (or maybe 200 if the speed curve is slow enough) telling you "congratulations, now try standard mode" 3) training mode. this would be fairly extensive, with many drills in it. This is there to show people that yes, the harder modes are possible, and give people a clue on how they can improve. I'd pay a good 40 bucks for this.
How much work would it take to tweak Lockjaw Engine to do this? How exactly does its scoring work again? I know it's only drops, no line clears. Already a preset scenario. First, someone would need to reverse engineer the game's RNG if we want the power-on pattern to extend past the 1,000 pieces that are transcribed. Standard, square, cascade, and the beginning of hotline are in LJ. Sticky is almost (no multimino, no puyo-style clearing). Fusion is not (no multimino, no "atom"). Does it need arcade-accurate grading? Standard vs. CPU and Push would need some sort of CPU player algorithm. Mission should be doable by modifying the goal code. Would you also need Catch, Touch, and Puzzle? All doable. Like mission in Tetris DS, right? Or a broader scope?
Hmm, if we're going to be that faithful, why not just package all these games together as one? For me, the definitive Tetris game is one that is customizable to a point that it can emulate all of these games and be capable of much more. Whether that can be done though....
Correct. It appears to be the same one used in the true original PC version. Score and lines are seperate. Tetrises are COMPLETELY meaningless. How score is decided. Each piece has a set value, which is lowered as the piece free falls, and if piece preview is turned on. For each line dropped without hard drop, 1 is subtracted. -5 for having piece preview on. Initial piece score is level*3 +24. That's it. Incredibly simple. It encourages you to hard drop as much as possible. Yes. this will be a royal pain. TIme to brush up on assembly. I think we can assume it is a LCG, though. Would be nice, but the important thing is that the gameplay style is there. Would be nice. The idea is to get everything that is in one of those 3 modern games, or as much as you can. but the basic game of each is the most important. The forward progress algo is a little trickier than I thought. But here's the way to do it. When a floorkick happens, it will reset, but then switch to a total lock time of twice the normal lock delay until it drops below the level of the original floorkick. This would be a broader scope. The missions would be set up to teach you to play. One that will show up many times is "get a tetris with the following pieces." Another one would be "get a combo of 10 within x pieces. "another would be "get 3 back to back tetrises" and it would be a challenging piece distribution. Clever use of hold and placements would be required. They would also not break the randomizer rules of the mode they are based on. Other would be very specific tutorial missions to help familarise yourself with the particualr mode of gameplay the mission os running in. One example would be to use your Baboo. "Clear x lines in y keystrokes" or "get x tetrises in y keystrokes". It will take a long tiem to develop this training mode.
