Apotris

Apotris v3.3


Hey, it's time for another update!

This time I decided to write a bit more about the changes, to either give a bit more info about them or maybe to explain their purpose.

The biggest change in this update is the addition of Classic mode! This mode tries to be as faithful as possible to NES Tetris mechanically, so that any technique possible on the NES version is possible here as well. Scoring should be almost the same as well. To accomplish this, I had to re-examine the DAS/ARR code, since NES DAS has a lot of quirks that you need to get right in order for it to feel the same. I also realized that my DAS/ARR code lead to inconsistent behavior in general, but more on that in a bit.

Along with classic mode, I added 2 new sub-modes for sprint and dig; sprint attack and dig efficiency. In sprint attack, your goal is to reach 20/40/100 lines by using the attack (garbage sending) mechanics rather than just clearing them.  Dig efficiency changes the objective of the mode from clearing garbage as fast as possible, to clearing garbage using the fewest pieces possible. This forces you to play a lot more carefully and strategically, while also being great practice for down-stacking!

Another huge change in this update is the new Skin Editor! You can find it settings, below handling. It allows you to create up to 5 of your own custom skins in a paint-like app! You can also change the small minos that are shown in the hold and preview boxes. You can already find some creative uses of this in the showcase channel in our discord server!

Speaking of settings, it was time for some organizing in the graphics settings. Adding options slowly over the past few updates, I mostly placed them at the end of the option list. Now similar options are closer together!

Of course this wouldn't be an update if I didn't add a couple more skins and palettes. The two new skins and the new palette are here to emulate the look of decades old versions of Tetris.

A problem that was created in one of the previous updates is the dig scoreboard. Changing how garbage gets created in dig, made the mode a lot less luck reliant but it also meant that if you had gotten lucky (or reset a bunch :P) before, you could probably never beat your previous times again. So I added a way to reset scoreboard in case you were in this exact scenario. Pressing L + R + Select while viewing any scoreboard brings up a confirmation screen (in case you messed up) after which the scoreboard gets emptied!

Another small change is that you can view your total playtime in the settings screen, so you can brag about how much time you've spent on tetris...

Now, onto some handling changes. As I mentioned before, DAS/ARR had a couple of issues. First, the number of frames for DAS to activate were more like DAS + ARR instead of just DAS which is different than how almost all games do it. And secondly, the ARR timer wasn't reset to 0 every time DAS was, meaning that sometimes DAS activation could differ by a few frames, making the handling feel inconsistent.

I also noticed an obvious problem with the disable diagonals option. In the previous version, if for example you pressed right and then up at the same time up would be ignored, regardless of if you let go of right and keep holding up. This again is different than most games do it. Now, you can roll from right to up, with up not registering until you let go of right. This should make the option feel a lot better to use.

The last change that was made to handling is allowing hold and rotation while the line clear animation is playing. I often find myself trying to input moves while lines are getting cleared, but all my inputs are getting ignored which feels very frustrating. This should help alleviate this problem a bit.


Major shout-out to all the people in the Apotris discord server who suggested new features and helped a ton with testing the beta release for this update!


This is all for this update, please look forward to the next one! If you find any bugs, please report them to me, preferably in the github issues or in the discord server!

Files

apotris.gba 2 MB
Oct 20, 2022

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