Notices

For my daily commute, I decided to learn pygame. With my trusty N800, a copy of Khertan's Pygtkeditor and the html docs of pygame, I spent the past few weeks porting an old Tetris clone that I had originally written in Java for cell phones across to Python/pygame and the N800. This was a surprisingly straightforward exercise.

In the spirit of free and open software, I'm attaching the current state of the script. The graphics are very basic and the menu system and high score entry are in a very experimental state. The bonus is the full game is contained within the single 36kb file.

To run, just download the file (and extract it from the zip -- using for example squishee ), then open a terminal and type "python [/your/download/path]/tgame.py". If you have python and pygame installed on your pc, it should also work there too.

Controls:
Main menu
"C" for classic mode, "40" for forty lines, "3:00" for 3 minute time trial
Toggle "Easy"/"Med"/"Hard" difficulty, "X", Escape or Fullscreen button to exit.

During play
* Use the D control to move the piece. Press up or enter (center button) to rotate the piece
* Use the touchscreen - touch below the piece to move it down, left of the piece to move it left, right to move it right, above and left to rotate anti-clockwise, above and right to rotate clockwise (I'm still tweaking the controls and sensitivity)
* Press the fullscreen button to exit at any time (or press escape on keyboard)
[I haven't implemented a pause button yet]

High Score Screen
High scores are saved in the users home directory. Separate high scores are kept for each game type and difficulty level.
High score screen will show whether or not you receive a high score
If you receive a high score, a virtual keyboard will show at the left of screen so you can tap in your name (very basic). The "<" is a backspace. Press fullscreen button or escape when you are done.
[Currently, the only way to browse high scores is to start the game and then exit it]

Short of fixing bugs and minor features, I'm unlikely to do much more with this game. Tetris is pretty much old hat these days and there's plenty of opportunity to write more interesting software for the tablets. the touchscreen is so liberating, yet its frustrating to see how so few devs are taking advantage of it on the maemo platform.

EDIT: Attached new ver that increases frame rate and fixes high score entry bug (virtual keyboard showed even if a high score was not earned). deb + icons coming soon...

here's a deb

the latest version (I realize I'm spending more time on this frivolous game than I had first planned)
* background images from free NASA image collection
* tweaked main menu
* squish/stretch the tile area with -/+

unfortunately, the app is now 2mb due to image bloat, so I need to sort out hosting (and figure out how to copy the images out of the main file system and onto SD cards)

a couple of screenies for now

now hosted in the maemo garage

http://garage.maemo.org/projects/tgame/

I wonder if someone has ported this game to Maemo 5. It seems like we can port a lots of games from http://pygame.org without much hassle.