Line Them Up

Haha, this is neat. A little disorienting when switching between games though. The consistent graphics help with unifying the games though.

This is FANTASTIC! Super ambitious idea, and it's insane that you got this much done for a jam. I love the idea of having a combat/tetris combo that you have to manage. I also really like the take on the original Tetris music. Graphics are solid, movement is solid, and everything just feels so smooth.

Great job!

Sweet pixel art! The mode switching transition could message a little better, but the mechanic is cool. I didn't get very far due to the webpage constantly scrolling from the arrow keys, so enabling WASD for movement as well would be nice!

For those experiencing scrolling of the webpage - yikes, looks like chrome is a real bastard about this? If you've got firefox available that's what it's tested in but I'll stick up a standalone version of it tomorrow and maybe see how embedding the itch page here goes for now (might suffer the same issue)

Clever idea using a quasi-realtime tetris to reload your weapon. Cute graphics too, great work!

One of the best entries I've played so far. Being a huge tetris fan growing up, I just loved this entry. Everything is just really good... Graphics, music, the stressful atmosphere and challenging gameplay. Just really really good overall. Cheers!

Such a clever concept. I think I would had never come up with something like that. Really good work on the art, gameplay and music! Quite challenging too! Well done!

This is amazing. Connection to the theme's a bit tenuous, but it's really fun! I kinda suck at tetris and so I only ever managed to make it about halfway, but I spent a lot longer playing this than I thought I would.

A bit of feedback: I found that having a small maximum ammo count detracted from the fun. I would often get a good streak going in the tetris game, but would end up wasting quite a few shots because I didn't switch back and forth often enough. I also noticed that you're missing the "image-rendering: pixelated;" CSS rule, so even though you've got a bunch of the other ones Chrome still blurs when it upscales the canvas.

Quieting the music when you tab out was a nice touch btw!

Interesting mix, but I must really have misplaced my tetris skills. It was really hard keeping in mind that up means instant drop of the block, probably because up is just one of the navigation keys in the other mode. So I would really have preferred some alternative keys so that shoot button did the drop and down sped it down but not dropping while possibly up did rotating. Or something. Nice game though and really well made with regards to style.

@all - thanks for the kind reception! :)

@Sean - good catch on the CSS, thanks. Will patch that this morning.
@local minimum - this was the best way I could find to map the buttons; the up to drop has indeed irked some people but the 2 "action" buttons for rotation makes too much sense to ignore. You can also tap the down arrow to speed the block downwards, fwiw.

Very cool. I couldn't really get very far because i'm apparently really bad at tetris ><. Good execution of a neat concept!

Ohhh damn!! That gameplay was so fun and innovative!!! And I love the little tribute piece at the end of tetris!! Greaat game!!

LOVE the feel of the game, and especially the remixed Tetris music!

Cool idea. Definitely something I can see kids playing in class when they are supposed to be doing their work haha. I love the artwork very much, the music is a nice touch too but, on the Tetris theme, did you change a note or is it just the Tetris theme slowed down?

I added some post-jam updates for quality of life; mode indication, extra shots from combos, and fixes for the chrome folks. Enjoy!

Re: music - it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korobeiniki (which also inspired the GB tetris music) with a few different notes and timings; figured it'd be "safer" to work from that than from the "real" tetris music notes.

This was a nice smash up of two simple games. Everything seemed to work great. It was a neat feature that sometimes the pickups weren't something you wanted.
I'd criticize that it's too hard to get ammo, but maybe I'm just that bad at tetris :/
Maybe if there wasn't an 8 ammo limit, it would be easier for me :D
Great art as well, looks like a real game boy game.

Really well made game! It was a fun experiment.

I liked that you have to balance the time you spend in each mode to maximize your score. It made for some interesting choices/sacrifices.

I found the switching between modes to be somewhat confusing, and I'd sometimes accidentally fire when I meant to rotate a block because of not realizing which side was selected. I feel like disorientation was your goal though, so it worked okay, and to some extent it was probably my own fault for being bad at tetris.

Some other small things:
- I'd like to be able to hold "down" to move tetris pieces faster.
- It felt a little unfair that zombies could attack in quick succession without any cooldown.
- I wonder if there could have been some more going on in the shooter, like more interesting level design.

I don't mean to be harsh though. Everything fit together nicely. One of the better games I have rated so far.

Really interesting concept. The aesthetic is also pretty good! However, there are two nitpicks that detracted from the overall experience, for me....

The game is nice and fun, but I felt that the Tetris RNG was quite bad (you can read up how TGM handles that here: http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/TGM_randomizer), giving repeated pieces and bad starting pieces quite a few times. Enhance the RNG would allow to more safely create a stack to save "acquire-able ammo".
Since the tetris doesn't run in real-time, if the RNG did help, one could pause the game when it had a 1-piece well and an 'I' piece to easily score a tetris a recover a lot of ammo. As it is, it was quite hard to do that. (I tried... >_< But I must admit that I'm a terrible Tetris player)

I did feel like the 100 robots target is too much. On a playthrough, I eventually stopped trying to gather ammo and kept circling around the level to avoid the robots. Even though I survived for around 450 seconds (and the spawn speed did increase, which is great!), there was no end to the robots. How long would it take for every robot to spawn?

@GFM - I'm aware of how TGM handles it - I just didn't have time to implement anything more sophisticated unfortunately! The bombs can help you clear out messy stacks.

As you say, getting an I piece in place to recover ammo is good, but you can waste a lot of time trying for the perfect stack - getting a few doubles in a row lets you clear out almost as many robots and can tolerate a bit more mess.

I've finished the game and can do so pretty reliably; takes about 10 minutes for a normal mode playthrough if you can keep up with the robot spawn rate - the trick is to quickly bomb if you fumble something badly rather than try to fix it, and keep the robot count below 2 (ideally only 0 or 1 on screen at a time) to keep the amount of movement you need to do down and let you focus on smashing out lines. The "death by masses" is the way most people seem to die once they've got the basics down :D

I've considered making an easier/"help i'm bad at stress tetris" mode a few times, if I get a bit of time before the judging is over I might! In general though I wanted to recover that "damn, this game is brutal" feeling I got from playing tetris as a kid.

@Nicolaigd - thanks for giving it a look; if you check back, you can tap down to move it down in single increments; I've considered making it tick down faster while holding the down key as well but again, ran out of time :)

@GFM in case there's any doubt - proof of victory: http://i.imgur.com/YQLnosu.png -> http://i.imgur.com/Bn8N9zr.png I went overtime to get some more tetris points as I'd struggled mid-game for a bit, haha :) Any missed shots really hurt.

I've been coming back to this game quite often. The more I play it, the more I like. But at the same time, the more I get annoyed by parts of it.

Most of my sessions last around 7 minutes. I usually take down around 50 robots. This mean, that I should be able to keep up to the pace you said and I would be able to beat it in around 10 minutes. However, to do so, I feel like I can't make any mistake.

That far into the game, any mistake on the tetris part (no matter if entirely my fault or if the RNG is to be blame*) means (to me) that you lost. If you try to bomb and restart, there's still no guarantee that you'll be able to quickly refill your ammunition. Also, enemies spawn so quickly that time is too short to properly try to do anything at all on the tetris side... And that's considering that I've given up on anything better than clearing two rows at a time (though the one tetris that I was able to strike felt pretty good), so one could say that I've been playing more "cautiously".

Some times, when I'm trying to evade hordes of enemies and regain ammo, I'll end up getting trapped by a newly spawned enemy and have no room to escape. This could easily be solved by requiring some distance to the player when spawning enemies. Trying to gain time still wouldn't be free, because the player would still have to maneuver around enemies.

I'd also really appreciate the "next piece" feature. I usually can't really make informed decisions about where to place pieces. I simply pick a placement that seems less worse on the long run (i.e., blind guess).

Thanks for the detailed comment back! I'll probably come back a few more times to this game... until I finally beat it! :)

* I understood that you didn't have time to implement anything better, but it's quite common for me to get consecutively 3 of the same piece. There's a moment the there's nothing else to do, except trash your stack.

it's a damn hard game. you have to split your concentration to manage both sides, but i love it. its a great idea and well made, also the graphics and sound are very palsent.
-Hisfantor

I finally did it! :)

It took me 798 seconds, and I got a tetris mastery of 128.