itch.io

Hey, glad you've been enjoying it! 

• Playable tiles on the edges of the play field was maybe one of my stranger design decisions for this game. There's a couple reasons for ending up with this:
  • The feature started as a request someone made to have safe display tiles on both sides, similar to the board's floor. This turned out to be extremely powerful, since you could just touch a piece to the walls as it was falling to reveal most of the tiles. So the new idea was to scatter a few mines on these tiles, so the ability was something you needed to "unlock" over the course of the run. In my infinite wisdom, I failed to realize that you could just randomly guess and reload the game until you get an easy space to 0-cascade (this was v1.1). So more mines were added to the edges (especially in the top half of the board) to quell this cheese method. This does sort of dampen it's usefulness as a catch-up mechanic, but sections of the wall can still give vital information after being solved the first time. So it's intended to be more of a minor "save my place" feature, rather than something to help if you fall behind. 
    • Now that I'm putting my original thouht process down to paper, it's got me brainstorming some ways to preserve and reinforce the orignal idea of "unlocking" safe spaces. Maybe all of the edge tiles could be shifted up by one each time you complete some objective? This could be clearing a certain number of rows, completing a tetrisweep, or maybe as a reward for quick play... 🤔
  • These edge tiles were introduced alongside the mine counter. Without a random number of mines scattered outside the playable area, it was trivially easy to see how many mines were in a new tetromino. This wasn't just a problem in the early game -- if your minesweeping kept pace with the tetris board, it could persist long into a run (at least until you get a few unlucky spawns that require a guess). Now you can still use this strategy in the current version, but the mental gymnastics required to remember the initial value and do subtraction on the fly makes it less powerful. 
  • I thought it looked cool. In fact, at one point I thought about making the entire background a playable game of minesweeper, but that seemed a bit overboard lol

• The tetromino rotation itself should conform to the standard SRS (if you notice any deviation from that, please report it as a bug!). This uses a simple wall kick with a right bias, rather than "super wall kicks": It checks up to 2 spaces to the right, then up to 2 spaces to the left to find a suitable location, with no vertical translations. 
• Ghost pieces are on my todo list, hopefully for the next update if I can find the time.
• Additional game modes would be interesting; I'll have to think on some that would make good use of the concept.
• I do need to do a proper overhaul on the SFX levels... but I've been putting it off because it's not as much fun as working on new features lol