Gridlocker
Ever wondered "What if Tetris, but also Pipe Dream?" Wonder no more! This falling block puzzle game for the C64 was inspired by a social media post. It's currently in beta testing. This means stuff may be broken, but also that stuff gets fixed. I value your feedback!
How to play:
- Move falling blocks with the joystick or ASD keys
- "Hold" the current block with W or up on the joystick
- Rotate the current block with spacebar or the joystick button
- Soft-drop the current block with D or down on the joystick
- Connect networks of blocks together with at least two "end" blocks.
- Score points for every block you clear.
- Reach higher levels for faster gameplay and higher scores!
This game ships as a .d64 floppy disk image, which you can use with any C64 emulator, or write it to a real floppy or floppy emulator to use with a real C64. It should work on C64, C64C, C128 in C64 mode, THEC64, and the Commodore 64 Ultimate. This game is tested to work with JiffyDOS and Dolphin DOS, but does not currently work with the fastloaders from Action Replay or The Final Cartridge III.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $2.50 CAD. You will get access to the following files:
Download demo
Development log
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
A good and new game idea. I added it to my video along with other games released in May.
Great game, thanks.
Nice game!
I finally got around to remapping the spacebar. I like the game a lot more now that I can rotate the pieces. I still haven't played for long but I'm starting to see some strategies. The game is quite good overall, even now (beta 2)
Thank you for your feedback! I'm happy you're enjoying it.
Just played beta 2. As far as I can tell, the difficulty setting adds more + pieces. I still found the game really really hard as the pieces are all *way too vertical*. I still found myself stuck choosing between stacking really high vertical columns of connections, or locking sections with a terminal away if I didn't want to build an obscenely high column that also locks away all that whole side of the board.
I know the Comodore is basically a desktop computer, but am I supposed to be able to rotate the pieces? As far as I can tell the game only accepts arrow keys and Z as inputs. Even just being able to rotate pieces would help a lot.
I would also like to see a slow mode where the piece doesn't go down automatically.
fire on the joystick or spacebar rotate the falling block pair.
I need to remap my stupid retroarch thing because spacebar speeds up emulation.
Dang - bought this gem!
Thanks for keeping C64 alive!
Thank you for buying it! I hope you enjoy it.
The end pieces don't come often enough by a factor of ~10. It's very hard given the single piece shape to not near-permanantly lock away parts of the board because there's no other choice. I'm left stacking vertical columns almost indefinitely which makes the game even harder because there's no extra height for the incoming piece.
Thank you for your feedback. Beta 2, releasing soon, features configurable difficulty settings that will address this.
Thanks.
I'm curious if you've considered using the tetronimoes, requiring exactly 1 terminal in each. It seems weird but the different shapes makes things much more maneuverable. Even including a 2x1 option would help a TON compared to just 1x2s
That is an interesting idea. I may try a prototype that works that way, thank you.
What I'm trying to get at is: I think this game would benefit from combos. Frequent terminals would help that.
Cool idea! I'll have to spend more time with it but the first 5 mins had me enjoying it
Thanks for buying it!
Thanks for making it!
The piece ghost (shows where falling piece will go) flashes. It seems to alternate frame by frame, whether it's rendered or not. (beta 1 on VICE x64, accurate).
Thank you for your feedback. This is the intended functionality. It helps visually show that the ghost piece isn’t “real”.
It would make more sense if it flashed at something like 2 or 3 Hz, or not at all. I think the player would quickly understand it's a ghost.
That’s an interesting idea. I’ll try it out and see how it feels.
Reads interesting. How about making the test versions available for free?
I understand your perspective, but the fee is so low (less than $4 USD) and will include all future updates and ports of the game to other platforms, including an upcoming native Linux version. I think the price is fair.
Up to you, it's your project. But I guess you will not get much feedback that way. Maybe I will buy when it is finished.
🙄
It may interest you to know that I just released beta 2, which includes a free downloadable demo version.