I made another game for s&box, this time it’s Tetris flavoured.

I love Tetris and think it’s amazing, and I’ve put a lot of hours into it over the years between all the different official games and the ones available online, and I’m pretty decently good at it now. One of the ones I’ve liked but always been shit at when I’ve tried it is Tetris The Grand Master. Official Tetris games since 2001 have (mostly) used a set of mechanics that are consistent across all of them, these are called the Tetris guidelines. TGM was released before then and doesn’t use the guideline implementation, so it has its own color scheme, rotation system, randomization and scoring system among others. In practice, it means that in order to get good at TGM you’ve got to learn TGM specifically rather than learning Tetris.

I wanted to make a TGM-style challenge but using the guideline mechanics, so that’s what I did. I made the first version in 2022 after we finished up Garryware where I got the main mechanics working and rendered the game using s&box’s UI system to make a 2D game instead of a 3D one. Then I ran out of time to work on it and it went on the backburner. Nearly a year later I went back to it and all the UI rendering was broken due to s&box updates so I started fixing it up to use quad-based sprites that existed in 3D, but again ran out of time to work on it.

Third time’s the charm though, since with their new scene system it was far easier and faster to get it working again. I cut out a bunch of the extra crap that I’d scope-creeped in over time and went back to it being a pure challenge. Reach the end, it’s going to be hard. If you want the best ranking it’s going to be really hard.

So this time I finally got it all working again and spent a few weeks polishing it up, designing UI and adding in menus, VFX, SFX, the works. Coming up with a proper difficulty curve for it was tricky since I wanted it to be a challenge to make it to the end for most players, which ended up with a lot of playtesting and going back and forth on numbers. In the end to increase the challenge to a level I was happy with I had to extend the speed levels past the standard 20 levels and add in master levels inspired by Tetris Effect’s master mode. The master speed levels start at roughly the same drop speed as level 20 but decrease other timers in the game to make it faster instead.

I tested it on the two best Tetris players I know and both came away happy with the feel of the game and the level of challenge, so I’m pleased with where the project ended up and how it all came together in the end.

Throwndown was a prototype of a 1v1 card game I was working on for s&box for a bit before I ran out of time to work on it for a while. It was based off of Marvel Snap, but set up to be round-based similar to a fighting game rather than single matches played through matchmaking.

I recorded the demo videos in 2023, it would need some serious overhauling to work in the latest version.

Like Snap, players have a deck of 12 cards which they deploy in 3 locations to try and have the most points at the locations at the end of the game. Cards and locations have effects which change how and where you want to play your cards. To better fit s&box’s audience, who would be sitting at a PC rather than playing on a phone, I made the game last for a best of 5 rounds so that a play session of Throwdown would ideally last between 15 and 25 minutes.

At the start of each round, players are given some vague hints about what locations will be coming up in the next round so they can strategize about what cards to bring. In the first round both players get the same hints, in the following rounds the leader gets less hints than the trailing player so that the trailing player has better knowledge about what’s coming up and can try to use that to their advantage.

Players can also swap some cards out of their deck between rounds. The winner of the previous round could only swap a single card, where as the loser was able to swap multiple. The idea was for players to be constantly changing their deck up between rounds rather than sitting on one fixed deck. The losing player will be able to swap cards out of their deck with knowledge of the winners deck and their cards, so they can specifically try and shut down their strategy for the round. The winner also has to think about what their opponent is going to do and can change their deck a little bit if they wish, so they can remove a card that they didn’t use, or can swap something out to try and anticipate what the loser will counter with.

For the prototype I was basing the cards off of Valve’s games for the various factions, where each faction had a theme to go with them. Half Life cards would modify the power of other cards at the location they were played at. Team Fortress cards were based around destroying your opponents cards in different ways. Counter-Strike cards would add “equipment” cards to yours and your opponents hands and decks which could be played at the locations.

The intention was to test the gameplay out and if it was fun enough to continue with then replace all the Valve stuff with new themes based around Facepunch’s games like Garry’s Mod and Rust; and games that were being made for s&box. But it didn’t get that far unfortunately.

This is an idea I’d like to come back to in the future though. This game was a bit of a mismatch for s&box’s entity-based systems at the time, but their new scene and components systems should be a lot better fit for it if/when I decide to give it another go.