Elevator pitch

A deck-builder tetris where you battle other people’s builds testing both: your strategic foresight and quick decision-making.

Try it!

You can try the game directly in your browser:

• Latest version – v0.1
  • Feedback form for v0.1.
• …

Clanker disclaimer

I don’t consider myself an LLM enjoyer, however, I have decided to try and use them help me build this prototype. You can read more about that decision here here.

Goal

As with all prototypes the goal is to evaluate the overall game idea. I am planning a few iterations, each focusing on a different aspect of the game. Gathering feedback after each prototype version to help refine each part of the game.

The end product of this series of tests should go up on itch.io. This page will be updated with a link once I do so.

Roadmap

Breakdowns of what either has been achieved or what is planned for in each version. You can view this as a mini-version of a game design doc.

v0.1: “The basics”

Planned Done

This version introduces the very basic premise of the game: 1v1 tetris with pieces that have custom effects. There is a shop where you can buy/sell pre-configured pieces. Currently you play against a simple bot, that doesn’t consider piece effects when making a move. Finally, there are no fancy events in the game, it’s a constant shop -> battle loop. Currently the goal is to survive 15 rounds without loosing all 5 of your lives.

Just to showcase what’s the general idea of the effects I have introduced a few very simple ones:

• Lightning / Slow – they speedup / slowdown the speed of the target.
• Poison – deals a small amount of periodically to the target.
• Antidote – removes some stacks of Poison from the target.
• Damage / Heal – instantaneously removes add a certain amount of HP to the target.
• Fire – applies Burn status to all blocks above and below.
• Explode – destroys all nearby burning blocks, applies Burn status to blocks next to destroyed ones.

As a small taste for what might be coming in the “Alchemy” prototype, I have added a single status:

• Burn. It does nothing, but serves as a trigger for other effects (well only Explode for now).

v0.2: “Alchemy”

Planned

For this version I want to introduce the theme of “alchemy”. Firstly, a few more statuses will be introduced. The idea is to then add a mechanic which would allow the player to transmute (change the existing effects) their blocks in the battle. This transmutation would occur once a block receives a status or a combination of statuses. In order for gameplay to be more interesting, different statuses will have different application rules.

<To be expanded>

v0.3: “Feats and combining”

Planned

Currently the game is easier for players that are better at tetris. I would like to strike a nice balance of allowing less skilled tetris players to still pull off satisfying builds, but also affording awider array of builds to the players that are good in tetris. This would be achieved by adding “feats”. “feats” would be something similar to the Jokers in Balatro.

<To be expanded>

v0.4: “Real battles”

Planned

I really enjoy the “fake multiplayer” aspect of games like Super Auto Pets, Backpack Battles or The Bazaar. I believe it’s a great technical solution that gives players the experience of battling other players without requiring large amounts of concurrently active players. This also enables meta to arise, which I find one of the interesting aspects of multiplayer games.

<To be expanded>