Show HN: Multiplayer Tetris built in 48hrs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Multiplayer Tetris built in 48hrs

nko2-forward.herokuapp.com

27 pointsandrewnez13 comments

For about two minutes I fell in love with this.

And then someone started repeatedly stacking blocks in any game I played to force a loss. And there was nothing I could do. Me and my teammates' beautiful castles of tetra...destroyed.

Find a way to fix that, and you have an amazing game on your hands. <3 it.

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EDIT:

So after playing a little more, and getting more acquainted with the game, I can add that I love the dynamic that multiplayer adds to it--especially when you have six or seven other players and you're all trying to space yourselves out evenly, and you sometimes have to cross the whole map, putting pieces in and fitting them around with other people--I had some people do some (incredibly good) anticipation of my moves and vice versa--it felt surprisingly cohesive as a team game for something that used to be such an individual effort.

I have a note about the IP of Tetris, because I seem to recall reading that they're: 1) quite strict about the licensing of the game and 2) adamant about the rules and structure of the game when they do give permission for it to be used.

I love Metris, and for a 48 hour project I think it's awesome--I also second the feedback given by Jarred, particularly for ghost blocks where my tetra-block will land, and the movement: holding down keys.

Were you able to actually clear lines?

I have been playing with a pair of colleages and when we finally got the whole thing ready for a tetris clear... the lines stood there laughing at us! :S

I love Tetris, so I can give you a bit of constructive criticism here.

- I don't want unlimited space for the blocks to move.

- I have no idea how this is multiplayer

- I should be able to press spacebar and the block goes down all the way at once

- I should see an outline of what the block will look like on the bottom, at it's current position and rotation

- Movement is weird - I should be able to just hold right or left arrow and it go several blocks over, versus repeatedly hitting the arrow keys.

- Change the key to rotate the block to something else that isn't an arrow key

Check out the Tetris games over at http://tetrisfriends.com for a good example. If you can make one without ads and with a better workflow it could be very fun/useful.

I hope that helps.

I've played many other versions of Tetris that use up as rotate, but besides that, you read my mind.

I went back and tried a second time. This is multiplayer because everyone connected to the site plays on the same map (I think? I saw one other person connect while I played).

The problem with using the up arrow as the rotation key is that you can only rotate it in one direction. Typically Tetris allows you to rotate both clockwise and counterclockwise using two different keys/buttons.

It was fun until someone joins your game and sabotages is by stacking blocks straight to the top. It happened in all the games I played. Nice app though.

Agreed - nicely built app with an incredibly easy way for people to troll :(

This game doesn't work for me in Firefox or IE... I see a block but it doesn't move and I can't move it. What now?

EDIT: Aha! It only breaks if I enter a Twitter username.

EDIT2: Nevermind. It stops working after awhile. The score moves, but I see no new pieces.

Change the name. Metris is just asking for the owner of the Tetris trademark to come after you (and they are quite well known for defending their trademark actively).

Worked great on Chrome[1] for a couple of minutes with a few players then crashed with the broken tab icon.

[1] Chrome 11.0.696.57 running on Ubuntu 11.04 32bit.

Something might be done to vary the pieces. My first nine pieces were all the same shape, the following 5 were the same and so on.

Is this all built in Rails?

looks like it's built in Node.js as part of the Node Knockout competition.

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