Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Crammed! (Tetris Clone) (1999)

Our IB school was tiny, with about 80 people (including staff) for 3 classrooms.  Needless to say, space was at a premium, and so was born the premise for Crammed!: Tetris, but with people.  You literally arrange people into as tight a space as possible, completing lines.  I wrote this game in the spring of 1999, and created the small-scale animated graphics; a friend of mine, Olivier, made all the large-scale matte paintings.  These drawings, which serve as backgrounds for the intro screen and the different levels, are more or less inside jokes referring to our school life.

The game is a simple Tetris clone, with a few variations.  Other than the usual single-player mode, you can play 2-player versus, where completing two or more lines sends an equivalent number of "garbage" lines to your opponent, and 2-player co-op, where two players play simultaneously in a wider play area.  You can also edit your own block shapes, as well as the probabilities of each block falling.  (The game did not use the 7-bag system; this was still a bit before the big wave of standardisation across games.)

The game makes use of my handwritten font, created with FontX.  All graphics were processed by E.


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