This project was my entry in Microsoft's Dream - Build - Play 2008 contest. The game is a Tetris like puzzle game. The main difference is that all the tetrominos are rendered in 3D. Each tetromino is made up of of four individual box models that have the corners rounded so the 3D lighting creates the relief effect that makes the tetrominos look like the traditional 2D game. Since each box is exactly the same, drawing all the tetromino polygons is extremely fast when using an instanced drawing technique. When all the tetrominos are batch drawn using a single call to the XBOX 360 the framerate takes no hit rendering large amounts of triangles. This leaves plenty of gpu time left to draw other background / hud elements. The game, as submitted, was far from complete. I was able to get the following features working for the submitted game:
Features:
- Instanced geometry drawing (tetrominos)
- All tetromino shapes (I, O, T, L, J, Z, S)
- Slow / fast drops
- Clockwise / counter clockwise rotations
- Line completions
- Hud tracks line completion types
- Hud tracks game time
- Increasing the difficuly over time (speeds up)
Movies:
