Free Falling Blocks AKA Physics Based Tetris is a really interesting idea to change a game we have been playing for years. In Free Falling Blocks the Tetris blocks fall down based upon physics and then react to the bottom and the other blocks based upon physics, which is being powered by Bullet Physics. The creator of this has uploaded a video to YouTube showing this in action. There is also a video on YouTube of a PhysX powered Tetris like game which looks like it is being developed for the iPhone. Pretty interesting stuff, check out the videos below.
From YouTube:
A demo of a physics based falling blocks game I’m developing. It looks better then in the video, and the win message at the end is off because I forgot to turn off lighting for that bit. Also the audio loses syne… but the game has impact sounds like at the beginning. The game was over 22minutes so I had to cut it down some. I will upload better videos once I make more significant changes. I have lots of enhancements still in store for this.
The pieces are manipulated by applying left/right and rotational forces. At each level the blocks gain more and more mass, thus making those forces have less effect. There is also a super gravity button that makes it fall faster which doesn’t change as the mass increases because that’s how gravity works. Because of the on restrained nature of the pieces, it’s easily possible to get them stuck in a bad position, they won’t lock in like that, and you can press r to teleport them back to the starting point (with a 100 point deduction for teleportation costs.) For most of the game I was using the super gravity and the quick lock. Without the quicklock (w) the piece will need to settle for a couple seconds before locking. In both cases it needs to be aligned closely to the grid in order to lock, you can notice a few times where the piece flashes, that’s because I tried to lock when it wasn’t lined up.
www.freefallingblocks.com will be updated as I progress.
3D Physics Tetris (demo):
