Tetrust

Tetrust is a tetris clone built as a text user interface (TUI) using rust.

Controls

key	control
A	move tetromino left
D	move tetromino right
S	drop tetromino
Left arrow	rotate tetromino left
Right arrow	rotate tetromino right
P	pause
ESC	quit game early

Index

• Why?
• Known gaps
• Installation
• v1.0 Features
• vNext Ideas
• A history in gifs
• project reflections

Why?

Why did I spend my time working on this?

• I wanted to write more rust code
• I wanted to write a TUI game
• Initially, I had aspirations this might be a good playground to experiment with data-oriented design and entity-component systems. That never panned out, but it was an original motivator.
• I found it gratifying to build something to a semi-polished "v1" state. Often, my toy projects get 40-80 hours of time from me before I hit some wall and lose motivation before getting to any kind of demo state.

Known gaps

As this is a personal project, there are a lot of gaps in functionality and polish. Notable ones include:

• no in-game control explanations
• no SFX
• no installer

Nevertheless, I still consider the game in a V1 state. Humor me :)

Installation

There is currently no installer. To install and play the game, you'll need to build and run from source which isn't too gnarly. As a prerequisite you'll need a reasonably up-to-date rust installation.

1. clone this repo
2. cargo run --release

v1.0 Features

Despite

• Basic tetris rules
  • Blocks fall and rotate
  • Lines can be cleared
  • Blocks fall faster as more lines are cleared
• Classic arcade-style leaderboard
• Separate start, game, and leaderboard screens

vNext Ideas

• game music
• SFX
• AI match
• Multiplayer match
• Network multiplayer

A history in gifs

As I was working on the project I thought it'd be fun to record each milestone in a gif to demonstrate progress. Here they are in reverse chronological order w/ attached commits:

• Automated CI/CD testing

• Add leaderboard

• Add start screen

• Handle quick drop and show drop preview

• Speed up pieces falling as more lines are cleared

• Scoring and line clears

• Handle pausing

• Preview blocks

• Allow tetrominos to rotate

• Constrain board size and add game over screen

• Handle game lose state
• Handle left-right inputs

• Add some sort of test framework

• Generate tetrominos based on game rules

• Add color to tetrominoes

• Get tetrominos to stack on each other and floor

• Get a tetromino to fall

• Get a tetromino to render

Project reflections

• V1 (Jan 18. 2021)
  • Tetris has some surprisingly interesting and complex rules that have changed and been tuned across its many iterations. The one I found most interesting (which I still don't really have a good implemenation for) was that many tetris games iterated on how pieces were allowed to rotate. In some early forms it was super simple but as the game was re-implemented and improved it became more complex. The gold standard for tetris games now usually requires some logic for "wall kicking".
  • As I was closing in on V1, it was wild to look back at the first commit in the repo. I started the project in mid 2019 and dropped it after making some sizable progress but running into a blocker with how I wanted to constrain the tetris board. It was very gratifying to come back to the project a year and a half later, unblock myself, and get to a V1. Tying up loose ends is a special sort of satisfying.

To be continued...? (probably not)