Hi pps. For me every new tetris-like game for atari is most welcome :) I've just played the beta version for about 15 minutes. It's really nice to play with so many colours!
As for the control system you propose (rotating blocks left/right with joystick up/down instead of 'classic' fire button), it's too early to say, because for now the game is far too slow to be really playable. It has to be more responsive and the blocks have to rotate and move horizontally much faster. Now if I need to move a block horizontally by X columns to the left, I keep pushing the joystick left, but before the block gets to the desired column it will also _descend_ by X rows. If I count it right, there's 14 columns, so if I need to move a block from far-left to far-right column it needs to descend also by 14 or 13 rows! That's game over most of the time :)
If the game is more responsive, it will be probably possible to learn the control system you propose, however, it would be nice to have a choice between 'classic' and 'new' control system, or even better a possibility to define custom controls in the game options. Support for keyboard, 2-fire and 3-fire joysticks would be great (I guess you know that this 2/3-fire joystick standard becomes more and more popular for Atari, C64, Amiga, etc nowadays).
One more thing, I didn't notice if there's a "tetris-bonus" for clearing 4 rows at once? If not, it has to be :) Please!
Keep up your work. Fingers crossed for you finishing the project. -- µicr0Bee
The problems you describe in the control is wanted by me, so you have to play tetris in a different style as you know. But I will try to add a standard option, so that you can roll and move the tiles as you know from many other tetris games.
Other input devices will be added, if I can. Have no 2 or 3 button stick in real, so someone else has to test it, if I find a description how they work.
Will try to have another beta next weekend, but no promise. As holidays are over, workday stress is there again :|
@PPS If there were some cycles available for a bunch of DLIs, using the GTIA trick to set some lines of hires to the left of the screen, would make it looking even more impressive. Using the Player 0 shape for the background color could help, keeping the colors right.
