Functional, but unwieldly.
...okay, nearly unplayable, but maybe with a different block-dropper...
Viewing post in OCTSHMUP : Overly complicated Tetris Shoot'em Up jam comments
As a legitimate lover of Tetris, I must say that some elements of Tetris are...unwieldly for this game. Tetris is interesting because you have near-perfect control of each piece, which allows you to clean up all sorts of messes you make. An example here of the need of such control, which is lacking here, being that if you start with an S or a Z, as I did, you would have to shoot a left or right at the perfect time to slip a piece in to not have a hole...or have to run into a mover to gain access to a garbage line to fill. (It didn't help that I 1. didn't know about garbage lines until well after, and 2. started with an S and then a Z.)
Simpler shapes would be simpler, natch, and allow for a better chance of a skilled player being able to "play forever", perhaps with dominos and triminos, or with color-matching games such as Puyo Puyo or puzzle fighter. But the ultimate goal of block-dropping puzzle games is either to be able to "play forever" like any good arcade-y score attack or to cause an opponent being competed against to top out or otherwise suffer a lose condition. These "controls" are not conducive to either...for Tetris. But perhaps another puzzle game...maybe these controls could make a simplified Yoshi's Cookie be interesting?
We thought of puyo puyo, but we thought it would be harder for unexperimented players to play puyo in an interesting way (the gameplay mostly relying on combos which would be too mentally complicated for most beginning players who would have to juggle with the SHMUP aspect), and, to be honest, we know Tetris to be more visually recognizable and popular.
In a perfect world, the game should be fine-tuned to have a more diverse controls on the screen, and a possibility was to add bonuses and maluses that would alter the game.
Thanks for the answer!