Tetris, the new FizzBuzz

No, I don’t really think Tetris is going to become the new FizzBuzz anytime soon. But a few days ago a colleague and I were talking about Tetris, and he mentioned that it’s apparently the most ported game out there. Not hard to believe — it’s fun, simple, and doesn’t require any fancy graphics.

Well, I’ve never actually written a Tetris clone. (I think you’re allowed to say that as a programmer.) Mainly I was curious how long it’d take. Things always take longer than you expect, so I guessed maybe half a day or a couple of evenings.

Turns out it wasn’t too tricky — I was having fun with the finished product in a short while (about two and a half hours). Almost half of that was spent on the “graphics” and keyboard input.

I wanted to time myself excluding writing the always-fiddly I/O, so what I did was start by writing four simple functions:

void setup(void);
void teardown(void);
void putsquare(int x, int y, int colour);
int waitkey(void);

I wrote a fairly basic (but colourful) implementation of these for the Windows console, figuring that I really wanted to concentrate on writing the gameplay, not spend time on fancy graphics. (Half of my game projects as a teenager died because I started with the graphics, and keeping track of all those VGA registers just got too hard.)

So here’s the challenge: take my Tetris I/O header file and my Win32 implementation, and see how long it takes to write your own tetris.c.

Or choose your favourite language and write your own versions of the I/O routines, and then time yourself writing the gameplay.

Email me your own version, and I’ll post it here along with mine in a couple of days. And no cheating, Googlers. :-)

Just for fun, for the version I like best I’ll give $15 for the author to pledge to a project of his choice over at microPledge, or a DecentURL premium subscription if you prefer.

Update: I’ve now added my version below.

23 April 2008 by Ben    8 comments

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