Tetra Zone is a modern take on the best known arcade puzzle game of all time for classic Amiga computers (title changed for trademark/copyright reasons).

This is a solo developer project and the initial version of this game was written for the AmiGameJam 2024 under the theme "The Sequel that Never Was" within the time frame of about 2 1/2 months.

This game expands on the original by having 3 preview pieces, a hold function, a "ghost piece" and support for "wall kicks", functions you would expect from a Tetris game made today.

One of my goals was to learn game development on a classic Amiga system  using modern tools and methods. I wrote a  game development framework named RATR0  which implements the techniques described in my Youtube tutorial series "Amiga Hardware Programming in C"; Tetra Zone is written on top of this framework.

Another goal was to achieve a stable 50/60 fps frame rate on a 5 bitplane screen, by using double buffering and strategically organized blit and sprite operations.

Controls (Keyboard):

• Cursor left/right: move piece left or right
• Cursor up: turn piece clockwise
• Cursor down: accelerated drop (soft drop)
• Space bar: hard drop
• Z: put current piece in hold or swap with current piece in hold
• M: toggle music on/off

Controls (Joystick):

• left/right: move piece left or right
• up: hard drop
• down: accelerated drop (soft drop)
• fire button: rotate right

Min. System requirements:

• Amiga OCS (e.g. 1000, 500, 2000) NTSC and PAL 512 KB Chip RAM, 512KB Fast RAM or higher
• Kickstart/Workbench 1.3

Acknowledgements: 

• Frank Wille (phx) for his work the Amiga version of VBCC and ptplayer
• Volker Barthelmann for VBCC
• Tetris Wiki (https://tetris.fandom.com/wiki/Tetris_Wiki) for game mechanics
• The folks who made the "Only Amiga" commercial

Tools used

• VBCC C compiler (http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vbcc/)
• RATR0 C game framework (unpublished)
• ratr0-utils for data preparation (https://github.com/weiju/ratr0-utils)
• Chibi Test Unit test framework  (https://github.com/weiju/chibi_test)
• PTPlayer for sound and music (https://aminet.net/package/mus/play/ptplayer)
• Aseprite for graphics editing (https://www.aseprite.org/)
• GNU Emacs my main IDE
• Protracker 2 Clone for soundtrack creation (https://16-bits.org/pt2.php)
• Audacity for sound recording and conversion (https://www.audacityteam.org/)
• FS-UAE Amiga testing environment  (https://fs-uae.net/)