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Comment by zzguy | Hacker News Reader

Had you made Tetris before? Or used an external resource to see any pseudocode? Reason I'm asking is, I was doing a similar thing with Snake and it took me a bit longer (probably 4 hours) because I messed up the basic mechanics in the beginning (I didn't think of how to structure the growing body as a linked list). I want to gauge how much I suck (at least at games programming) lol.

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I once spoke about it with a friend who had to do it in C. However C is a dangerous trap here, I think it gets you in the wrong mindset.

Data representation is pretty universally one of the most important things (basically the "design" part to me). Four hours is pretty quick I guess. Snake might be more difficult (but an array or llist + snake direction + board map should be straightforward). I'd done chess that week and the representation is also doable unless thinking about AI or history or... which is when I quickly go bikeshedding. Multiple different representations for different tasks (and transforming in between) might be a way to go.

I made Snake in 103 lines of ClojureScript for a talk once: https://github.com/pate/cljs-snake (LOC excludes whitespace and links to repo). Comes in under 100 LOC if you strip out the aesthetics.

Very nice!

Check out the encoding of the tetrominoes in this implementation: https://github.com/jakesgordon/javascript-tetris

My subsequent port to C and Arduino was very natural: http://youtu.be/t3QOeQbEHVs

Here's one I wrote a long time ago in Z80 assembly for the TI-86 graphing calculator: https://gist.github.com/electrum/76ac88de2e1d6c9254deaba003a...

The "Random" subroutine looks surprisingly simple

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