I made a promise on someone else’s blog to post the code for the Tetris clone I made a while back, probably in fatigue induced delirium, a little bit ago, so here it is in a new Google Code project called unFocus.Games. The post on bit-101 post was about game architecture. While developing the code for the clone, I did play with concepts around architecture quite a bit. I also played with learning about Flash 10 features – adding PixelBender filters, and even having an Ogg Vorbis based soundtrack for a while (tried both the HaXe decoder, and the Alchemy decoder). I took them both out for now though, as well as some of the more unorthodox uses of Actionscript 3.0 I had in there – I was experimenting, and besides, Flash CS4’s compiler is a bit more finicky than Flash CS3’s was. One of these days I’ll get around to blogging about some of that stuff.
The Tetris game has an event driven engine under the graphics. I wanted it to feel close to the old NES and GameBoy version of the game I remember as a kid, and didn’t want the animation stuff to get in the way of that. The text version of the game in the demo I posted is almost a raw dump of the engine data. The field is a 2D array of 1s and 0s (looking to learn bit shifting and similar concepts at some point, by converting that to a ByteArray of ints). I also did the pieces (tetrads) as 2D array representations of bitmaps at one point, but didn’t feel like working out the rotation math, so I ported a pre-calculated coordinate version of the tetrads from an old Actionscript 1.0 version of a basic tetris game I once wrote.
Quick note about the code – I used TweenLite to do some of the quick animations, but I did not include that in the repository. You’ll need to grab a copy of that yourself, and add it to your class path to compile the source code as it is. At some point I plan to remove that either entirely or replace it with Tweener (because of the licensing).
In regards to game architecture, I don’t know if it follows any particular pattern (MVC seems to be quite popular these days – can’t talk about software design without hearing of that). Anyway, the code is probably far from efficient, as that hasn’t necessarily been a goal as I wrote it, and it’s far from finished, but there are some fun bits in there. Feel free to take a look, and share any thoughts. 🙂