So, after many years of screwing around with programming games, I finally decided to just sit down and make a whole one, one with all of the standard parts, and maybe a little something extra. I built a basic, 2-player Tetris game, with one snag: you play the game by arm wrestling your opponent using a special rig. I got the idea from someone from one of the Philadelphia tech blogs asking me if I could build them a Tresling rig. I started the project, I contacted the original author of Tresling, he said he was cool with it as long as we didn't call it Tresling, the tech blog dropped the project (with no reason why), so I kept my work for myself. Check out the game in action. Here is another video of my bald head... erh, of me explaining the concept a little to my first opponent.*


This took place at my workshop, Hive76. I did all of the programming (C# and .NET 4.0 in Visual Studio Express) and artwork (Photoshop CS4). One of the other members at the space did all of the music, using a couple of Korg synths, a Casio MIDI electric guitar, and Reaper (though he said he didn't like Reaper. He uses Cubase at home, but we needed to record the music at the last minute at the shop). A third did Street-Fighter-esque match voice-overs (you can't hear those here, unfortunately), and helped me with construction when I got pressed for time. I built the control rig around the internal circuit board on a standard keyboard (seriously, it's super simple, experiment by using a wire to connect different combinations of pins and you'll be able to figure it out form there).

Anyway, if you live in the Philadelphia area, probably your only chance to ever play this game will be tomorrow from 8pm to midnight. If you're interested, check out the Hive76 website for our location.


*On a completely unrelated note, this guy didn't recognize me, but he interviewed me for a job several months ago, but eventually decided I wasn't a "good cultural fit". In other words, I didn't fit the culture of not being paid very much.

Actually, yeah, I was unemployed for the last two months. It was my choice, but I really didn't have many other better things to do.

Who would win? Brutis the arm wrestling master that sucks at Tetris or Norton the computer geek with no forearm strength?

Well, the first runs of the game seemed to favor someone with strength who bided their time and tried to drag the game out as long as possible. But, once we got used to the control system, the game got a lot better and there was a lot more strategy involved. You had to fight to get your piece into position, and then try to drop it at with as fast of reaction time as possible before your opponent threw your alignment off. I actually set the high score for the night, having cleared 6 lines in a single match before my opponent failed out.

This was an extremely fast project completion. I'm super satisfied with how everything turned out. Everyone at the workshop thought the graphics were great, but I really loved the sound track, because it was so many orders better than I would have been able to do on my own. Very, very happy with the outcome.