Temptris

One day I was musing over Atari’s classic vector-based arcade game Tempest, and for some reason I decided it would be amusing to combine it with Tetris. The idea should have died there and then: these two games don’t belong together, and the result would a hot mess. But then I realized that the resulting hybrid could be called “Temptris” (sounds like “Temptress”, I guess?), a cute enough name that I knew I would have to write the game. Here is the result:

WARNING: It seems as if there may be a problem with the rendering engine that will cause severe flickering on some devices. If you have a seizure disorder or are otherwise sensitive to flickering, please don’t start the game. Sorry about that.

If you’d actually like to play it, I hope the controls are simple enough:

• Left and right arrow keys to move the current block around the well.
• Up and down arrow keys to rotate the current block.
• Space bar to drop.
• P to pause.

You might need to click in the game window in order to get it to recognize your keystrokes.

Because of the extreme perspective, I expect the game is largely unplayable (though playing Tetris without being able to read the well is an interesting experience, akin to blindfold chess). If you really wish to get through it (the perspective zoom at the end of the level, inspired by Tempest, is pretty badass), press the D key to activate a more conventional Tetris visualization in an overlay.

There’s not much more to say about this experiment. The whole thing is written in P5.js, with the vector display simulation operating as WebGL shaders. The game doesn’t add much to the Tetris (or Tempest) genre, though I haven’t seen a Tetris variant in which the well can be a cylinder, and that turns out to be somewhat interesting. I love musical mashups, so it’s satisfying to contemplate game mashups as well.

Thanks for playing!