Paper Tetris: Hours 6-10

I managed to squeeze 4 more hours in on the 24 hour Paper Tetris project. Added items were piece rotation, score keeping, board scanning (to detect complete rows), some adjustments to the background graph paper to accommodate the width and height of the blocks, and some basic collision detection — well, basically making sure a move is legal by checking it against the game arena for any block clashes.

It might look pretty much done, but there are still a few things to do:

1. In real Tetris, a move doesn’t end the instant your piece butts vertically against a fixed block. In this version, that’s exactly what happens. So a little delay needs to be added to allow you to slide pieces underneath gaps.
2. The game background was separated into two textures, a background image (the graph paper) and a HUD texture. I still need to make the HUD look cool and look a little more functional.
3. There’s a strange bug that might be mine, or it might be in the GameStateManagement sample. Basically, if you start a game, then end it, then start another game, we get a null pointer exception. Not sure why yet.
4. The block drop speed should increase as points increase.
5. Nothing happens when you lose yet!
6. Sound and music!
7. Some nifty effects? (if time permits)
8. Input handling is a little whack. You have to hit the arrow keys (or gamepad controller) every time in order to force a move or rotation. I’d like that to remain for the rotations, but I’d like to handle left/right/down properly if you hold down a key/direction.

None of that should take very long, which will hopefully leave enough time left over for some eye candy.