Note: this cart has been superseded by Pico de Pon: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=74540#p
v1.02 notes:
- Add more celebration sfx (trumpets) for big chains, depending on chain reaction length
- One-player scoring is scaled by the initial difficulty selection
- No garbage blocks fall in easy mode
- Fixes crashing and correctness bugs (Thanks everyone for testing!)
- Outstanding issue: some match correctness issues for blocks sandwiched between garbage remain
v1.01 notes:
- difficulty balance
- single player scoring and high score table
- additional juice
Feedback appreciated.
Picotris Attack is an implementation of the SNES classic competitive puzzle game.
How to play:
Clear blocks to prevent the stack from rising to the top.
Use button 2 to swap the tiles covered by the cursor. Tiles may be swapped with empty space for vertical movement. Use button 1 to manually raise the stack.
Matching at least 3 tiles of the same color (either horizontally or vertically) will clear the tiles. Matching more than 3 tiles at once -- or via chain reactions caused by falling tiles -- will send "garbage" blocks to your opponent's stack. (In 1-player, the blocks are instead sent to your garbage block score in the top-right corner of the screen.) Garbage blocks can only be broken by matching adjacent regular tiles.
Special "attack" tiles (gray with a !) are added to the rising stack at random. Matching 3 or more of these will send special garbage blocks which do not break along with adjacent standard garbage blocks. They may be cleared in the same way, though.
The 1-player game is fun and addictive but the 2-player game is where it really shines.
This was developed along with @stephan_gfx.
For single player controls:
- arrow keys move cursor
- x Swaps position
- c pulls the board up
This game doesn't get the attention it deserves. Apart from a really difficult( and so challenging and funny) single player game, yesterday i had the occasion to try the multiplayer mode with some friends. We lost two hours and our voices.
Thanks. This was made before the version of pico-8 which loosened the token counting rules -- so it was 8191 tokens following a lot of painful optimization.
Since that change, it looks there are now about 2300 tokens available. When I get a chance, I'll get some music and mascots in there.
It's amazing! I totally forgot about it but now i don't regret checking it again. It really feels closer to the original games than the first verisons!
(Note that the Easy difficulty is way too fast than the original game in terms of block swap/disparition, I wasn't ready for this :p)
Happy to hear that someone other than us got to try the multiplayer mode! Its our preferred way to play the game! (re: @Baerius)
It also sounds like we might need to scale the difficulties a bit. Thanks for all the feedback! the pico8 community is the best :-).
Like the note says, if anyone gets a chance to try it out and let us know how the new difficulties feel, would love to get feedback on it (or juice, or anything else)! Thanks!
hum. I don't really see what has changed. easy mode is still too much for me. most of the time I'm losing with the upper half filled with grey blocks, I feel cheated :( I don't know where they come from, am I playing wrong? what about the [!] in 1p? do they have any purpose ??
there's no point having difficulty settings if it's only about speed. maybe call that 'speed' or 'level' like in tetris? or you could remove the long blocks altogether in easy mode, that would certainly help (weren't they a 2p only feature in tetris attack?).
tbh I never really liked tetris attack, so take this with a grain of salt. otherwise I find it all very well polished.
edit: g_tick ended up nil
this is really nicely done and well polished! i especially like it as a multiplayer game.
i did notice some things that i thought could make it even better. these basically come down to taste, so do with them what you will. (for reference, most of my recent experience with this type of game is with pokémon puzzle challenge and animal crossing puzzle league.)
- i find the garbage clear speed to be too fast for easy or normal mode.
- i find the delay when holding down a direction to be too long, to the point i'd rather press repeatedly almost always. (i'm aware it uses the built-in btnp.)
- it's a little hard for me to predict when moving a block in the way of a falling block will cause a chain. sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.
- i find the cursor movement sound a little bit too strong.
good work! this is one of the games i'm keeping bookmarked so i can keep playing it, like with friends ^_^
Long time professional Panel de Pon player here.
I just want to reinstate what helado said about a few things
specifically the clear speeds on easy and normal being far too fast. It would be easy to get the timing correct watching youtube videos. The other important thing is the chains caused by moving blocks under falling blocks, it is very spotty, like he mentioned. It only seems to work like half of the time if even that.
i found a case where three blocks in a row aren't clearing (look near the top):
i noticed this happening once before and the common element was the blocks were on top of garbage. have no idea if that has to do with anything.
Thanks for the repro cases. I'll dig into that portion of the code (which is untouched since the original 2015 release). I'll look for iffy chain detection too.
Wow amazing job! One of my all-time favorite games on my all-time favorite fantasy console! :D
I'm here to beg you to do a couple of things, for which I'd be happy to pay....
Firstly fix the combo chains whereby you switch a block into the path of falling blocks, and secondly to remove the garbage blocks entirely from single player so that it just becomes a chill endless mode rather than an emulation of a two player game...
Other than these, this has got to be, if not my favourite pico 8 game, certainly second or at a push third.
Thank you, and I hope you're still active!
Willing to pay DOMU ? Hmm ... let me see ... an unmarked Swiss bank account for a half-a-million pounds British sterling ought to do it. :)
No, seriously, part of the challenge of being a game programmer is taking code others have written and discovering what you'd like to change in it.
If it's something you think others would like, you can share your version. I have done this in a few games I like, mostly because I suck at action games. :D
Want to turn my head ? Make it a turn-based game and if it's fun and cerebral or just ZEN I'll almost always give it high marks.
I've realised that easy mode has no garbage blocks! Hahaha I'd never tried it! And I get so zoned out in the harder modes I don't even know whether it gets quicker as time goes on, if so I'm almost perfectly content, apart from the flaky combo sliding technique..
A turn based zenith multiplayer version, now That is an idea. Maybe I could do this in game maker or processing (ie java) but have no LUA skills. You could even have a turn based multiplayer where both player share the same board.
mind spins with possibilities
ANYONE LISTENING?! MAKE DIS PLZ!
Just a note, I've probably got the world's highest score. I always play on NORMAL.
My high score list is:
370
313
282
273
271
I play this game at least 4 hours a week.
I've also found tons of bugs and have crashed the game multiple times. I don't care, this game's damn good. I also edited the title screen to just say Tetris Attack. I'm a dork, I like this game, leave me alone.
:hseiken
wow. thats impressive. i'm a noob clearly.
can you consistently do active chains in picotris attack or am i right in thnkng its flaky half the time?
I can do chains all the time, and you get points from 4 of a kind and 5 of a kind. Stop aiming for 3. If you're looking for 3 of a kind, you're playing it wrong.
oh I know, im a long time tetris attack player. something about the active chain timing is throwing me off in picotris attack, wheras i can do it consistently in tetris attack (active chains being where you destroy some blocks, then slide another in between the falling blocks to make another chain, obviously you know this but im just clarifying in case my terminology "active chain" is wrong - that's what they called it in pokemon puzzle challenge on the GBC anyhow!)
will try harder
Oh, nice, I never noticed this game! I love Tetris Attack, I made a "tweettweetcart" (560 characters) version of it earlier this year: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=64589#p
There's some cases where, it appears, to keep problems from happening, it locks sliding stuff into new chasms preventing 'active chains'. Instead, I tend to set up chains before hand if possible at the future 'valley bottom' before clearing out the blocks to make said valley. Also, it IS possible with good timing to slide out blocks into that gap, but overall, you risk bugging out the game, which has happened to me quite often (though I still end up going for it sometimes if it's early in a game, so I don't risk soft locking/crashing a promising high score possibility).
So like..it's definitely easier to use junk block transformations to do combos, you just have to act a LOT faster.
I hope that helps how I play. Also, I tend to get higher scores by just stopping the clock as much as possible and generally, I try my best to keep it stopped after 5 [!] blocks and do as many 4/5 sets as possible in that time. I've come back from the brink of death too many times to count by this simple tactic of just keeping the pile from rising.
Good lucK!
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