Note : This is much more Game-Specific than my regular posts!
Bombliss is one of my favourite alternate Tetris games. It has all the playability of the original Tetris, and it also has bombs, and chain reactions and things, too.

Last night, I opened up the Tetris sourcecode for the Retro Collection, and started hacking away for it's Xtra Mode. (renamed so it looked more obvious on the menu) For reference, to start a Xtra Mode game, either hit X to start the game instead of A.. OR tap the far right of the menu item, where the new X's are.

So, starting off badly, things got progressively worse! First up, not only did the blocks have to rotate shapewise, but they now had to rotate "bit"wise, too. That is to say, once you start adding bombs to specific parts of a Tetris block, those bombs have to rotate into the right places as the pieces spin. That was awkward enough, and took quite a rewrite of my spinning routines to get it going right.

Happy that it now worked, I started adding the bombs into the play area. That was easy enough, since they're just layered over the standard array, and drawn on a foreground layer. Nice and easy to keep track of. Unfortunately due to the fact that I have no "Big Circle" sprite, I haven't added in the "2x2 Big Bomb" object. If I can figure out how to do it in the next few days I might add it back in. For the meantime, it's MIA.

Then came the time to add detonations. At this point I had to play Tetris Blast on my old Gameboy several thousand times to work out exactly how it all worked! I think I got things pretty similar, although minor differences will probably be noticable.

Detonations over with. I was starting to feel proud of my tweaks, and replayed the game in classic mode to be sure I hadn't broken the original Tetris game in the process.

Next up was the new falling mechanism. Since there are explosions throughout the playfield, the remaining bits no longer fall Line by Line, but instead Clump by Clump, with each seperate grouping dropping as it should. This bit has taken by far the longest time, and probably much longer than it should've done! In the end it was easier than I thought it would be.. (I was over thinking things again!)

If anyone else is recreating Bombliss, perhaps this might help. Do the checks line by line. For each line, find each group of blocks. If any block in a group has a block under it, hold the group up, otherwise drop the group. Much easier to do it line by line, than having to check every possible "under" block of every brick within a whole multi-line group!

And so, there it is.. Bombliss. It's done and dusted, and I'm pretty happy with it. I still have to tweak that 2x2 Bomb in, somehow, and I'm sure the scoring's totally off by this point, but it's at least playable the way it should be, and I'm happy that I can finally play a decent Tetris AND Bombliss on something other than my aging gameboy! Long live Tetris+Bombliss!

Oh, and I got ship-diving and power ups in the Invaders Xtra game, so it plays a bit more Galaga-Like.. Yeay!


Not sure when this next release will appear. Maybe once I've added plenty of Xtra modes.. But more than likely once I've added another 6 brand new games, instead!