Happy 15th birthday, Glorious Trainwrecks!
I guess it's a belated birthday, because it's a little after midnight here. But that's probably fitting, because I recall deciding to launch Glorious Trainwrecks at like 2 in the morning when I really should have been in bed.
For many years this place was a refuge for me, a place I felt completely comfortable to be myself, to make mistakes, to try new things, and above all, to have a great time with friends. I don't spend a lot of time here anymore, but I think it has been and continues to be a place like that for a lot of other people too, and there is little that could possibly make me happier than that.
For the past couple of years I have been experimenting with strange game livecoding workflows in Lisp. For the 15th Anniversary Klik Jam I thought of a way I might be able to share a taste of that with everyone.
Edtris is, on the surface, a very boring game of Tetris. It doesn't keep score, it doesn't speed up, the rotation algorithm is wonky. But if you play for a bit and then press the "E" key... well, something a bit magic happens.
Developed on Linux and brought kicking and screaming into Windows - run the "Edtris - RUN ME.bat" file, not love.exe. Hopefully everything works right for you on Windows, I didn't test it super extensively.
Linux and Mac users, this should work for you as well - just install love2d, open a terminal, cd to the directory holding the game, and run "love ." Packaging it into a .love file doesn't quite make sense for reasons that may be clearer after messing with the game for a bit.
Comments
Wow, far out. First I played
Wow, far out. First I played it like a regular game of tetris and since I'm not bad at that game about 20 minutes went by and I was like "uh, this is tetris."
I won't spoil any surprises.
Works for me on Linux by the way. At first I typed love by itself and didn't work but adding the period and it works!
I've been a lot more
I've been a lot more explicit about what the twist is when posting about this elsewhere, so don't worry too much about spoiling. The magic is in what you decide to do once you know. Screenshots would be especially delightful to see! I linked here on the official #fennel IRC / Matrix channel and one of the folks there started posting all kinds of wild stuff:
https://i.imgur.com/eO45Yyn.png
https://i.imgur.com/2VqFRB9.png
https://i.imgur.com/1Bu7k3n.png
This is really cool! Have
This is really cool! Have always wanted to work with an in-game editor like this. This is the first time I've messed with a Lisp-like language, but was able to get some cool effects anyway. Adding
(set state.current.piece (Rules.choose-random-tetromino))
below (do (set state.drop-ms nil) in the update loop is my favourite effect though >:)
Ohhhh I like that!
Ohhhh I like that!