Paper Tetris: XNA Tetris in a Day

In my last post, I mentioned that I’d be doing a Tetris in a Day article soon.

Since I’ve got a lot of real world work to do, my “day” is going to be spread out over a couple days. I am keeping track of time put in though, since part of this article is going to focus on exactly how fast you could build a simple concept game like Tetris using XNA.

Here is the result of the first 5 hours:

As you can see, the concept is “Tetris on a Sheet of Paper”.  I’m kind of revealing my game geek here, but I used to draw out my favorite games in math class and do my best to “play” them when I was supposed to be paying attention.  I’ve always wanted to recreate that experience with a new game, and I’m using this Paper Tetris project to test the idea.

If you’re curious, the background graph paper is just a scan of a sheet of graph paper (with some adjustments to make sure things are evenly spaced).  I am also using the pretty awesome Art Rage 2 program for the game arena and the blocks, to get that “created on paper” look.

Stay tuned.  The first 5 hours saw most of the art completed, and the block & shape classes 70% complete.  All that’s left is to add a little game logic and some scoring, and of course input handling, and it’ll be ready to go.