<aside> 🪟 Compose freely, position wisely, collect them all!
</aside>
In Tetra, you compose colorful Tetris shapes, place them adjacently to other cells on the map and collect groups of matching color cells to progress.
At first glance, Tetra can look trivial but don’t be fooled. Simple but deep mechanics reward tactical thinking, and an ever expanding set of special moves give you tools to face new challenges. Up to 3 hours of emergent gameplay awaits.
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Making a game with composable Tetris shapes was in my mind for quite a long time. For example, THIS was on my desk for at least two months. I was interested in that, but found it difficult to match with anything worth doing.
Back then, I had been thinking really big - my brain had been occupied with combining RTS gameplay with composable Tetris. I was making several concepts and was trying to find promising system dependencies. A few of them caught my interest to the point of dropping the composable Tetris all-together and focusing purely on them. That’s how Emergent Shapes experiments were born.
Emergent Shapes took some time, but eventually I got back to the drawing board and started with a simpler idea - combining composable Tetris with Match-3 mechanics. I made a quick prototype from the remains of Emergent Shapes and brought it to the Something Random office.
The result exceeded my expectations. The first prototype spread like a virus. People could not stop playing it! With the confidence gained from the first version I decided to develop the idea further. Without me noticing, I was making a quite big project (in terms of solo pet projects, of course) and found myself adding a progression, movable power-ups, random-balancing systems, a game flow & ending, a save system, shops, a cheat console, feedbacks, sound effects. The list grew exponentially. A tiny prototype became a five months commitment.
In the end, I had too much of it (at this point, I think we should all refer to it as some kind of game development syndrome of “Prerelease Aversion”) but it was totally worth it. Primarily, it gave me a solid understanding of the process of restricting and balancing emergent endless gameplay. Going through the whole development cycle of the product, even a small pet project can really open one's eyes and I find it a priceless experience for the creation of bigger games.