Rust Tetris

This is a simple console-based version of the game Tetris, written in Rust.

How to play

git clone https://github.com/mikejquinn/rust-tetris.git
cd rust-tetris
cargo run

Movement keys:

• Q - Rotate counter-clockwise
• E - Rotate clockwise
• A / S / D (or arrow keys) - move left, right, down
• Space - Drop piece to bottom of board

You've played Tetris before. Colored shapes (called "tetrominos") drop one at a time from the top of the game board. The object of the game is to guide these pieces to the bottom of the board and position them such that they completely fill horizontal rows. When a row is full, the blocks in that row are removed from the board, and all set pieces above it will drop down to fill the space. The more lines you clear, the more points you earn. However, as you earn points and advance to higher levels, the pieces will start dropping faster. The game is over when the board fills up to the top of the screen and there is no room for place a new piece.

Implementation

The game board is implemented as a multidimensional array of Option<Color>s, where None means that no blocks occupy that cell. The currently active piece is stored and rendered separately from the board. Once the piece has reached the bottom of the board and is "locked", its colors are copied over into the game board matrix.

Game input and the piece drop timer are handled by two separate background threads which send game events to the main thread over a channel. One thread simply sleeps and sends GameUpdate::Tick events, while the other blocks on keyboard input and sends GameUpdate::KeyPress(Key) events as they are detected. Rust's powerful enum type makes it very easy to describe this communication from the background threads over a single channel without having to resort to a more complex class hierarchy.

A simpler design for handling game input and the drop timer may have been to use Rust's select! on two separate channels (one sending input events, one sending tick events). This would obviate the need for the GameUpdate type. Unfortunately, using select! on channels is not supported in Rust's stable compiler.

Next steps

There are still a few very small pieces I need to build before this is a feature-complete Tetris:

• Scoring
• Game levels with increasing difficulty
• Wall-kick
• Game over