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So, @Nyeogmi and I have been tinkering with @Vanessa's PicoTetris. I've been giving it more and more mechanics inspired by Tetris: The Grand Master, and Nyeogmi has been finding ways to keep the game running at 60FPS despite the stuff I've done to it. So, together, we present: Extreme Tetrom! Immensely more TGM-like and 100% less trademark-infringing.

Updated 2023-9-12 - Ver. 7.5 - Save-Compatible to 7.0 or later

Cart #extreme_tetrom-15 | 2023-09-13 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
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Extreme Tetrom is a homage to Tetris: The Grand Master, Arika's series of Tetris games designed to become very difficult, providing new challenges to experienced players. It isn't a clone of any TGM game - it has its own difficulty curves, grading system, and surprises - but it should feel familiar to TGM players. Using a variation of Super Rotation System - the "normal" Tetris rotation system in modern games - it should feel familiar to Tetris players who have never played a TGM game, too!

If you're used to other versions of Tetris, watch out for the special rules around "floor kicks" (pieces getting popped up so they can rotate when they're on the ground) and lockdown. Floor kicks can't pop a piece back up into the air anymore, and the only way to reset the timeout before a piece locks down is to move it to a lower row than it's been in before - moving, rotating, or "climbing" the piece upwards won't help. Think fast!

Think very fast indeed - once gravity is instantly spawning pieces on the floor of the well, the game still finds ways to get faster and faster, reducing the delay between piece spawns and giving you less time to maneuver on the ground.

This is Extreme Tetrom. Can you master it?

Controls

L/R: Shift piece to the side
D: Soft drop
U: Hard drop
X,Z: Rotate
X+Z together: Hold piece

Modes

  • Marathon: A classic mode for players who want a traditional Tetris experience. How quickly can you clear 150 lines? Game speed follows a curve similar to "standard" Tetris games.
  • Sprint: Marathon, but for only 40 lines.
  • Infinite: Played for a high score, this mode also uses a standard Tetris speed curve - although it starts doing some very TGM-like things to try to force the game to end once you've been playing for a very long time...
  • Grandmaster: Inspired by Arika's TGM series, this mode's speed fluctuates throughout play (until it reaches 20G, at which point it only gets harder). You're playing for a grade rather than a score; combos, clearing more lines at once, playing quickly, and making it further into the game will all help your grade. Can you survive to Level 1024? Can you achieve the grade of Grandmaster? There may be some surprises along the way...
  • Intermediate: For players who are not ready for Grandmaster mode yet, but want to get there. Designed as a training mode, ramping up the speed more slowly.
  • 20G Trainer: For players who are ready for the first half of Grandmaster, but aren't ready for 20G speeds! It starts out at 20G with very forgiving lockdown time. It gets less forgiving, and ends where Grandmaster starts its own 20G play.
  • Intense: Inspired by TGM2+'s "T.A. DEATH" mode, and TGM3's "Shirase" mode, this mode starts at 20G and gets harder. The only thing you need to do is survive. How far can you make it? There is a last level. Can you get there?
  • Grandmaster+: A more challenging variation of Grandmaster mode for people who want their game spiced up! Garbage rows will appear with increasing frequency throughout the game.
  • Intense+: Similarly, this adds garbage rows to Intense.
  • Extreme: For people who thought Intense+ was too easy. There is a last level, but I do not believe it is within human capability to get there. Prove me wrong.
  • Lightning: A race to 40 lines - in the dark. You'll get a brief glimpse of your well every time you drop a piece. For a while, at least - then you'll have to clear a line to get that flash of light again...
  • Invisible: And if you prefer your darkness to be absolute, here you go! The ghost piece is useful for tracing out the shape of the top of your well - right until the ghost piece itself disappears.
  • Blitz: How high a score can you get with only 128 tetroms? Watch out -- this game gets very fast, very quickly!
  • Impossible: "'Impossible' doesn't mean 'very difficult'. 'Very difficult' is winning the Nobel Prize; 'impossible' is eating the Sun." --Lou Reed, in Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors

Notes

I hope folks have fun with this game! I have always been fascinated by the TGM series and have wanted a home release of the games in the USA; no luck yet, despite hints by Arika last November. I was impressed by Vanessa's "Pico Tetris 1.1" game, and saw its existing references to TGM - "secret grade" mode and unique piece entry sound effects per shape - but I wanted to go much further, and make it into a true homage to TGM inside Pico-8. There are a few rough edges here and there, but I consider myself to have succeeded.

If you'd like to add your own modes to the game, check out tab 5. Speed rules are pretty much spreadsheets. Note that the engine interpolates linearly between gravity speeds (but not between ARE/DAS/lockdown speeds - those are stepwise, and only at section breaks), so you'll need to add an explicit "endpoint" at the same speed if you want the game to hold a speed for a while. Gravity is measured in frames per line, so 0.05 is 20G mode. In the actual speed curves, I'm using 0.005 instead - 200G - because rounding errors made 20G not quite behave like 20G, but way-more-than-20G works just fine.

I'd love to see folks' highest grades in the GM modes and furthest sections in Intense and Extreme! If there are bugs I haven't caught, they might be in the late parts of Intense or anywhere past level 2 of Extreme - they seemed okay when I tested them with the difficulty turned way down, but I have not been able to genuinely test the higher levels of these modes with their real difficulty curves enabled. I'm no grandmaster.

Are you?

added 2022-8-21:

Extreme Tetrom is not a "clone" of TGM -- it's not intended to be. It's my reimagining of what a "modern" TGM game could be, using modern piece movement and scoring, but not easing back on the difficulty in the slightest. TGM3 and the Xbox version have "move reset" on their SRS modes, which dramatically pulls back on the extreme difficulty that TGM is supposed to achieve. I've reinstated it -- lockdown timers only reset when a piece moves down to a lower row than it has ever occupied before. Floor kicks are legal, but they can no longer pop you back up into the air.

Extreme Tetrom is intended to stand up to very serious play. In my shower fantasies, a bored TGM player takes the game seriously and it develops a genuine, competitive following. That's very unlikely, of course, but a dubiously-human lizard monster can dream, can't I?

Changelog

Version 7.5 (2023-9-12)

Adds a new mode, Impossible. It's, uh, exactly what it says on the tin. It also saves the last mode you played between game launches. If there's no saved last mode (because your save file is older or you're a new player), it starts on Grandmaster mode, which is probably what folks are looking for but the name provides enough of a warning that maybe it's worth looking around some if a player finds it too intense. (I'd previously had Marathon as the default, because it's the friendliest to new players, but in practice I just get complaints that the game is boring and easy.)

Version 7.4 (2022-12-9)

Fixes a crash when scoring a Twist Trio (clearing 3 lines at once with a T-block, possible with some careful setup and exploiting the kick rules).

Version 7.3 (2022-11-27)

When you open the high score gallery, it starts on the same mode you had selected in the main menu. (Similarly, changing modes in the high score gallery will change the main menu mode, when you exit back out to the menu.) There is a new option in the Options menu to reduce or remove the debris shown when removing a line. (The default setting, "Lots", is the original amount of debris.)

Version 7.2 (2022-9-5)

Fixes flaws in scoring that sometimes made a triple effectively worth more than a quad in Grandmaster grading. Increased combo value for GM grading. Fixed bug where I didn't consider combos at all in scored modes. (oops!) Improved high score display. Your grades are phat now. Save-compatible with 7.0 and later: the game is easier now, not harder, so there's no reason to wipe your scores!

Version 7.1 (2022-8-24)

Adjusts speed curve of Grandmaster mode immediately before 20G. the attempt to bring about a sense of "calm-before-the-storm"-related dread by dramatically slowing the drop speed felt like a weird, jarring bug because the speed is so slow it feels like drops simply froze. Now the speed drop leaves it in a range where gravity doesn't feel immediately frozen, but it definitely feels strange and uncomfortable, like something is about to happen...

Version 7.0 (2022-8-24)

Use 32-bit tostr for scored modes. Good luck overflowing the score counter now. Added alternate score display logic for scores over five digits long. Fixed score sorting bug in Scoreathon mode. End-of-game screen no longer passive-aggressively congratulates you for scoring zero points. End-of-game screen tells you when you get a new top-3 high score. Makes the transition to 20G in Blitz mode less jarring.

Version 6.4 (2022-8-22)

Improves end-of-game grade display.

Version 6.3 (2022-8-21)

Breaks save compatibility. Adds a Scored Marathon mode. Truncates level display when it gets long. Fixes an end-of-game level bug. Fixes broken scoreboard. Improves result display.

Version 6.0 (2022-8-21)

Breaks save compatibility. Massive token savings by doing scary things replacing game with _ENV were put into popups announcing cool stuff, detecting and scoring "T-twists" and "streaks" (watch out - score standards for GM grading have increased to compensate for these new scoring opportunities!), and implementing more modes. I'm kinda low on tokens again, but I'm seriously low on compressed code size -- it's definitely going to be hard to cram more into this game. But I still have ambition...

Version 4.1 (2022-5-16)

Breaks save compatibility. Removes several options to free up tokens and sound effect space for future development. Go back and reconfigure your settings if you customized them.
This version changes the speed curves for most modes. Grandmaster hits 20G sooner but the final round isn't any faster.
When the lights are on, the well outline fades to black as your piece locks down, giving you a visual indicator notifying you that the lock will happen.
The frame drops that used to happen during line clear animations while the well is nearly full should be mostly resolved, in exchange for a single dropped frame after each piece locks and at the end of the line clear animation - both of which are during ARE, so it should be less noticeable than the general performance degradation that can happen in 3.x while animations are complex. This has gotten a lot of performance headroom back, which I intend to use to add additional UI in future versions.

Version 3.5.1 (2022-3-31)

Fixes bugs in saving and loading options (some options were swapped in serialize/deserialize, which is why you might have noticed them trading off on every cartridge reboot; oops).

Version 3.5 (2022-3-30)

New option: careful hard drops. If careful hard drops are enabled, hard drops don't happen while the left or right key is pressed. (If you "roll" from a side to the up-diagonal to straight up, the hard drop will happen in the frame where you release the side key.) This should help reduce erroneous hard drops when using a gamepad (or, say, the control pad built into an RG351V), although it won't help you if you're accidentally hitting straight up first. (It's useful for imprecise gamepads that tend to hit up plus a side at the same time, though.)

New piece randomizer: after creating a sequence, it swaps pieces forwards in the sequence if it's a repeat from the least three pieces - but it doesn't check if the swapped-backwards piece itself is also a duplicate. It does three passes of this. This helps spread out clumps of the same piece, which feels like a really unpleasant way to lose, while preserving the generally less-predictable nature of the 3-bag randomizer. The real TGM randomizer is more aggressively non-cluster-y (history 4, 6 redraws) but doesn't let you make predictions about the future (not a bag randomizer). Nothing wrong with the TGM approach, I just continue to have a design goal of "not quite TGM".

Version 3.4 (2022-3-29)

New option: the bleepy little tune that plays when a piece enters can now be selected either by the shape of the piece that just entered or by the next piece. TGM's behavior is the next piece! Players without save data will get TGM's behavior, but existing players will get Extreme Tetrom's previous behavior (which is to pay a sound for the piece currently entering). This can be freely changed in options.

Version 3.3 (2022-3-11)

Hold piece is faded when hold is unavailable. Hold for first piece is fixed. Fixes DAS bug introduced in 3.2.

Version 3.2 (2022-3-11)

Pieces now spawn after ARE rather than before; now the "thud" sound effects are audible! This means the "next" piece indicator doesn't update until after the new piece is actually in play, which is less confusing (and also how TGM handles it) since there isn't that moment where the piece yet-to-enter is not actually shown as "next".

This also includes "real" IHS/IRS. The original ARE behavior existed to support rotation/hold while still in ARE; now Initial Hold / Initial Rotation behaves like TGM. Due to control limitations, there is no way to use both initial hold and initial rotation for the same spawn.

Rotation never auto-repeats now.

If a piece cannot move horizontally when left or right is pressed, then as long as that button is held, it will move at the first opportunity. This is important when gravity is close to 1G: if you attempt to move a piece sideways into a small slot, if you're too early but not early by at least the DAS charge, you can miss the slot because the piece tried to move (and failed), then does not try again until the DAS delay expires. Now, if a piece fails to move horizontally, it will bypass the DAS delay and move on the first frame it is able to do so, as long as the button is still being held. (It will not continue to move horizontally until the DAS delay expires. DAS delay is being counted for the entire duration of this hold, so if a piece is stuck long enough to consume the entire DAS delay, the piece will immediately continue to move.) This behavior does not apply to rotation.

Version 3.1 (2022-3-6)

Initial public release.

P#108108 2022-03-06 02:01 ( Edited 2023-09-13 03:40)

1

This is seriously incredible. i'm so stoked to see a good copy of tgm thats not nullpomino grade master.
My current best grade is S4.

P#108404 2022-03-10 21:47 ( Edited 2022-03-10 21:58)

Hey @sidrocka, I'm glad to hear you like it so much! I was hoping that someone other than just me would find it a worthy demake of TGM.

I've just updated the cartridge: pieces now move immediately when they can if they were blocked in a sideways move and you're still holding the button (rather than waiting through the DAS delay; the DAS delay is still enforced for additional steps of that move, but it makes the first one as soon as possible now). More visibly, piece spawn is now at the correct time (end of ARE rather than before it); that fixes timing for the piece entry sound and "next" piece advancement, and Initial Hold / Initial Rotation now work the same as in TGM. (Kind of. You can't use both at the same time because Pico-8 doesn't have enough buttons...) So if you want an even better TGM experience, you might want to grab the update!

Because this update doesn't make the game more difficult or change scoring, it does not clear your high scores.

P#108467 2022-03-11 23:09

New update: piece entry jingles can now behave like TGM and play a tune for the new next piece rather than the one that is currently entering. Players who already have a save file will need to go into Options to enable this; new players get it automatically. It can be freely changed.

Also, I am deeply amused to discover that if I search for "Extreme Tetrom" on Google, it's been re-hosted on a few other sites, surrounded by ads, with incomplete control instructions and a description written by one of these sites and then it, too, was copied by the others.

P#109351 2022-03-29 07:31

This has some bugfixes for the options menu - I'd swapped some things during save/load.

P#109479 2022-03-31 17:42

Big update! Piece lockdown is now animated: the outline of blocks in the well fades to black as the lockdown timer runs out - as long as the lights are on. You'll lose this indicator when the well is dark.

This changes save file IDs so:

  • your high scores will be wiped
  • your settings will be reset to defaults

This version removes some of the options previously available, to give me some tokens (and performance) back.

Speed curves have changed - Marathon and Grandmaster get faster sooner! Both modes "give this back" later on - they introduce an intermediate level where I think the step between fast speeds was too harsh, in exchange for removing something that still felt too slow to me. This is why I broke the save file - your high scores for 3.x aren't comparable to your high scores for 4.x because the game behaves differently.

I haven't spent the tokens I freed up yet, but I have Ambitious Plans for scoring and displaying popups for twists and consecutive "difficult" clears (4-line clears, twists), etc. Also trying to compose some 2-channel music for this, although I don't think I have the inspiration; will keep plugging away at that.

P#111920 2022-05-17 06:51

Massive update! This also changes save file IDs.

Cart #extreme_tetrom_11-3 | 2022-08-22 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
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Extreme Tetrom 6.0 includes:

  • popups to announce quad clears, T-twists, consecutive quad or T-twist clears (a "streak"), and a sequence of clears with consecutive pieces (a combo). obviously I am avoiding some trademarked terms here.
  • The line clear animation looks a lot better.
  • The line clear animation speeds up as the game gets faster.
  • There are several new modes!
    • Intermediate: A "bridge" between the classic modes and Grandmaster, for players who find that Grandmaster gets too fast, too soon but want to work up to it.
    • 20G Trainer, a "slow 20G" mode that starts with very long lock times and works up to the speed 20G starts at in Grandmaster. (Intense had previously had a very slow section 1 to allow it to be used for this purpose. It doesn't need that feature anymore...
    • Sprint mode is back! It's a 40-line version of Marathon.
    • Blitz mode: how high a score can you get with 128 tetroms? Watch out - the speed curve is very aggressive in this mode!

I did some aggressive changes to free up tokens and it bought me all these features, but now I'm almost out of compressed code space. I don't want to take a minifier to it - I want to let people actually read this code, and maybe trace it far enough to design their own modes.

I would like to overhaul the end-of-game screen so it points out new high scores, new 2nd or 3rd high scores, and draws a distinction between finishing a mode (that is eligible for scoring even when you don't finish) and not. I spent my tokens and code size on new modes instead, though.

I'd also like to multiply all Endless mode (and Endless-like) scoring by 0x0.0001 and do something clever to display it like it was just a normal integer, and something clever-er to keep displaying it reasonably in a 5-digit display.

But, these are dependent on squeezing code size further, or getting rid of something. There may be more dead code I haven't found...

Edit: Now up to version 6.3, courtesy of a friend finding bugs. Adds one more mode, Scoreathon, which is just Marathon mode played for score rather than time.

P#116125 2022-08-22 02:55 ( Edited 2022-08-22 07:21)

Hey, folks! I've updated to version 7.3, which adds an accessibility option -- if the debris when lines were cleared was too distracting, you can now reduce or remove it in the Options menu. It also improves navigating the high score gallery.

I've published Extreme Tetrom to Itch, including native binary exports, at https://kistaro.itch.io/extreme-tetrom -- share the link if you know folks who would enjoy the game, but don't use Pico-8 themselves! There is also a complete gameplay manual there.

P#121494 2022-11-27 21:50
1

Almost made it ;_;

P#130222 2023-05-27 16:27

I think some of the stuff is cool, but tbh it plays way slower than the original pics Tetris. Idk if u wanted it to be slower but it’s a chore to play, you can’t change you settings so I struggle with moving the pieces. The new game modes r cool but the gameplay is balls. Rip Z/S spins

P#130322 2023-05-30 18:02

Also rip you don’t get extra points for full clearing the board

P#130451 2023-06-02 13:19

Hello ToxZc,

Try Grandmaster, Intense, or Extreme difficulty. That might be more the difficulty level you're looking for. Marathon, the mode selected at startup, is the easiest.

Options about soft drop and delayed auto-shift speed were removed because the game is designed around auto-repeat happening at a specific pace, which accelerates at very high speeds.

P#130527 2023-06-05 06:15 ( Edited 2023-06-05 06:19)

I’m playing the game and I’m thinking yo the is faster in those other game modes, so gg on that, but another thing that has nothing to do wth game. Idk what or how ppl use the blocks with lines and stuff, the blank pieces r way easier to see imo, dark parts of pieces could be a bit brighter but that’s just a me thing.

P#130544 2023-06-05 13:55

So Tetris’s give 9 points and T-spin triples gives 13.

P#130545 2023-06-05 14:14

Literally my 5 post here and prob my last but bruh how tf do you beat sprint mode in under 1:35, I’ve spent like 1 hour total and I can’t get below 1:35. How

[EDIT] I got 1:22

P#130590 2023-06-06 13:08 ( Edited 2023-06-06 13:26)

very nice job on the 1:22!

There are a bunch of different score systems in the game. The 9 and 13 points you're talking about are "level" - it's programmed as 8 and 12 points but you also get a level just for dropping a piece. Progressing through levels as quickly as you can is the goal in Intense, Intense Plus, and Extreme -- your final score is the final section you reached (higher is better) and the time it took you to get there (faster is better). Other modes use different scoring to reward different forms of play.

Grandmaster scoring deviates the most from expectations. You're given a "grade" (which goes from 9 to 1, then S1 to S9... but there are also M grades and, of course, GM); your final game score is your grade and the time at which it was awarded, even if you weren't told about it at the time (in-game grade display shuts off for dramatic effect at high ranks). Internally, you have a secret score that decays to 0 over time; every time it goes over an internal threshhold, you get a grade (9 to 1) or half a grade (S1+) and the score resets to 0. As your grade increases, the secret scoring gets less generous, especially for singles. However, later sections have high base score multipliers to compensate for the extreme difficulty. Combo scoring, "streaks", and "twists" (avoiding some trademarked terms here, heh) have a large effect in this mode; bigger line clears have a stronger bonus from combos specifically, so it's worth more to do big clears at the end of a combo than at the beginning. (It's also harder.)

All this is heavily influenced by Arika's TGM games, but it's not a TGM clone -- I've redesigned all of these systems to produce what I personally believe is a more interesting game, but that is ultimately a matter of opinion!

The various block sprites aren't all to my taste either! I changed the ones I liked least in Pico-Tetris, but they're definitely not all winners. Feel free to change sprites 1 through 15 in the Pico-8 Sprite Editor to give your own designs a try, using only colors 6 (light gray) and 7 (white).

Speaking of colors, you're also welcome to try an alternate color scheme. Sprites 16 through 22 define the pieces (when I say "define", I mean "define" -- the initialization code actually parses the sprites! so if you wanted to try a wildly different game, there's an obvious opportunity, just drwa some different shapes through their rotations; note that the special kick rules for I and O, and twist rules for T, are linked to those particular sprite locations). These sprites have flags set. The first four flags (as shown in the Sprite Editor) represent that piece's foreground color and the last four are the background color; note that the high bits are towards the right. Color #15 is used for the well outline color cycle effect and is not available for coloring anything else without some code changes.

If you want to try your hand at changing the game rules, check out tab 5, --modes, and its function init_modes(), which defines the rulesets for each mode. Yes, the game speed rules are specified as spreadsheets.

P#130626 2023-06-07 07:10

okay, after playing with it a bit, I do recommend trying color 15 for the foreground color of literally every piece. not, like, for serious play, but it's kind of a fun effect.

P#130627 2023-06-07 07:12

Update! It now starts on "Grandmaster" mode by default, saves your last played mode, and adds "Impossible" mode, which is exactly what it says on the tin.

P#134248 2023-09-13 03:44

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