   so you think you're good at Tetris (please play my first game)
  Hey! I'm going to post a link to the first proper windows game I've written, and my first game which used DirectX. (I'm using DirectX 8.1 so you'll need that if you want to play.) I've been on this board a few weeks now and this game wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for some people helping me in places, so thank you for that.Tha game is called "FallenBlocksRis". It's a completely original idea for a game, honest! *coughs*It is an okay game, I think. There's a bit of a twist on the original format (you can play with shapes more than four blocks for instance). It took me about four weeks, certainately not an hour or whatever the audacious claim is. I did learn a lot though. Making a finished game is a lot more hard work than could be imagined. Even simple things like a main menu and a highscore board took quite a bit of time up.There are things I don't like. The way I handle some graphics is really sloppy. But I've corrected these for my latest game (smashing-bricks-anoid). And there's no sound! But I can learn that another day.Okay, I've talked myself up enough. Here is the link, hope you have fun:http://www.angelfire.com/alt/thenix/fallingblocks.htm[edited by - jaggy on April 1, 2004 8:12:53 AM]
  Hi JaggyI thought your game is very good. I am looking to get into programming myself and was wondering if you could give me some advice as you are a very good at what you do. Can you tell me what you design your graphics/animation with, you said on your website that it was Direct Draw where can I purchase this software from?? Also how do you make the animation run with the graphics? Hope you can help me it would be great to get some info back from youMany Thanks ;  Congrats. A finished game!I played a little ... but the controls were a bit weird.Not really smooth ... not sure how to say that.Still ... great result.I''m stuck right now with my Breaktris (Breakout/Tetris combination)I know how hard actually finishing a game is ...frankiej: Direct Draw is a part of DirectX afaik.So it is probably not the software used for creating the graphics. ;  (frankiej)Hey, glad you liked the game. As for your questions: the graphics were all done in Paint Shop Pro, a wonderful piece of software. I then put these bitmaps into Visual C++. All animation is handled in c++ code. As for direct draw, you're in luck, it's free. You can get the DirectX SDK on the microsoft website, or download it off a cd when you buy a book about it. Direct draw is just a sort of interface that takes your c++ code and passes the information to your graphics card to draw on to the screen (other people here will be able to explain it better.)If you're just getting into programming don't worry about directdraw or any sort of graphics for a little while yet. Have a look at the "For Beginners" resource. I'll probably put my source code on my site tomorrow when I have a little more time. It does use a lot of classes and horribly confusing things like pointers, so don't take a look at it straight away else it will put you off. Give it quite a few months and you'll be posting a link to your first ever game too.At least somebody played my game, so that made me happy  thank you.   [edited by - jaggy on April 1, 2004 5:49:24 PM];  thank you for playing clueless.  The controls were weird? Maybe they do take a little getting used to, but I did want to let the player rotate the blocks either direction (like the original). A lot of versions of Tetris that people make use the up key to rotate only one way, which is just urgh.Thanks for your comments ;  I think it was especially when I moved the block down and to the side ...the block didn''t follow as fast as I expected.But that is probably because I played the tetris version from the tutorial here too often ;  very nice looking testris clone. i like how you made it complete with everything. good work. also, it crashed when i lost... it said something like "game over... you have won high score... put your name" ..then it crashed, im guessing it had something to do with the file i/o or however your high score routing works because it crashed as soon as that happend ;  oh no, crashed? I thought I got rid of all those silly hi-score errors. I didn''t like the way I did Hi-score though, so I could do with re-writing it.Did you manage to type in your name? Or did it die as soon as the gameover sign popped up?I''m guessing it just didn''t create the score file properly, and it errored when it tried to write to the non-existant file. I really need to put checks in my code for things like that Thank you for playing. ;  i got it twice, and the second time i put my name in, then pressed enter and it crashed. also, it crashes if i start the game and click on high scores ;  Found the error now, thank you. It seems if you don''t type a name in (just hit enter) it corrupts the scores file and every time it is accessed it errors.Thanks for finding that. If you want to play properly you''ll need to delete the score.bin file and load it up again. 