Coding Challenge #43 - Tetris

Tetris hit the news this week with reports that a US teenager Willis Gibson claims to be the first person to beat Tetris by reaching level 157 at which point the game apparently crashed.

With that in mind and amid many request for more Coding Challenges related to computer games, this challenge is to build your own version of the famous computer game Tetris.

The requests make sense; for as long as I have been interested in programming, programmers have been learning by building computer games. Many of us started by building our own Pong and over time progress to either copying other more complex games, building our own game from scratch or customising existing games.

I certainly spent a lot of my childhood cloning Sensible Soccer and the Alien Breed franchise before moving on to writing ‘AI’ based bots for Quake, Quake 2 and Quake 4.

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The Challenge - Building Your Own Tetris

Tetris is a computer game that has been around since 1985 and has appeared on many platforms since then. It is one of the best selling computer games of all time.

Fundamentally the game is quite simple the player completes horizontal lines at the bottom of the screen by fitting in shapes that descend from the top of the screen. Completed lines disappear, earning the player points. The game ends when the uncleared lines reach the top of the screen.

Step Zero

In this step you decide which programming language and development environment you’re going to use. This would be a great project to try a frontend stack if you’re a backend developer and if you’re a frontend developer perhaps try building a desktop application.

If you’re from a data engineering or site-reliability engineering background you could leverage your knowledge of Python with PyGame or Go with Ebitenegine. Rustaceans can check out?are we game yet?for useful crates.

Tetris is a relatively simple game to build and as such, is a great platform for learning a new technology, or programming language.

Step 1

In this step your goal is to create your welcome screen. This screen should give the player the option to start a game or access some basic instructions on how to play the game - i.e. the controls and perhaps an introduction to the gameplay. You can leave starting the game until the next step, but you should render the help screen as part of this one.

You could even include some high scores. Something like the following:

Continued...

You can find Step 2 and beyond on the Coding Challenges website as build your own Tetris.

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