I like the idea! I couldn't get the hang of it because of the unpredictable piece shapes. Maybe sticking with the standard Tetris pieces would have been best.

Always love a good tetris game. Main things I might take away is:

* Make the play space less busy. The white background grid clashed too heavily with the foreground blocks;
* There doesn't seem to be much penalty for preventing the blocks from clearing, other than just getting tired of holding down SPACE ;)

This is a pretty cool take on a classic game. I'm actually surprised that I haven't seen the **HOLD** mechanic before. What made this even more interesting was the shapes of the falling pieces (as I have never had to work with them before).

I think some music would add a lot of life to this game, but with such little time, I understand the need to leave this out.

Good job!

@siege: I appreciate that some developers might want to try and stay a bit closer to the original source material (regulation shapes, arena size, ect.), but I wasn't too interested in doing that for this project. Thanks for the suggestion though, I'm sure it would have led to some more balanced/anticipated gameplay.

@marekkpie: My intent was that the hold mechanic would make things riskier for the player since locking rows leave less space for the player to move around in. But outside of that, there really is no greater reason to not try and hold for ever row.

@doc-ill: I'd bet in the 30 years someone probably has done something similar. Sometime I need to work up the nerve to try adding some custom audio, but I definitely cut things pretty close on time for this one. Maybe next time!

I cannot believe that the thematic was basically Tetris, or a snake game!

For that, well done, also nice new mechanic you're bringing to a classic. It made the game so much more satisfying to get that perfect 4 lines in one go :)

If only this game had some sounds as well, but no worries :)

Good job! :)

@tiberiusuciu: Yeah, the original game naturally fits the theme pretty well, so it was a bit of an easy out choosing it as the basis. However since I've been writing all my games from scratch in a custom engine I kinda needed the crutch just to finish something by the deadline. Burning the first night of the jam on dead end ideas doesn't help much in that department either :).

Ahh this is a neat little twist on Tetris, that's for sure!

I was confused at first as to why "hold" existed, and it was only once I held something that fell into place did I realize that I could gain more points by holding onto the clears, but doing so makes it harder to deal with the board. It's nice to see something that both provides a challenge when using it, but is a compelling option to use for high scorers.

Personally I'm torn between whether the "aha!" moment I had was better than it possibly being made clearer going in as to why you would want to, so take from that what you will. Overall that twist fits the theme nicely.

I do understand straying from the source material, so I can understand the piece changes, but there are some things that are pretty standard in stacking games that I feel are missing from this that would make it a bit more playable. (Although, these are merely suggestions, and may only bug someone like me who plays **a lot** of Tetris)

- The accelerated drop seemed to only work if I mashed the key, whereas it's standard for holding the key down to keep it going quickly. The controls help leads me to believe this might have been the plan? I only know what I was able to get from this, and that it was frustrating to mash a button to speed things along when I know what I want to do.

- Pretty much every version of Tetris (except for maybe the originals) would let you delay the piece locking by rotating the piece around, although not indefinitely. Here it seems that the time it takes to lock is dependent purely on how long it is touching another piece below it for, which makes it difficult to put pieces into awkward positions. This also made it difficult to pull off t-spin equivalent moves.

- A ghost image to show where a piece is going to slot in directly down is really helpful for speeding up recognition in a player in regards to where their piece is, especially since it allows them to keep their eyes on where they want the piece to end up, yet still immediately know the position and shape of the piece they've received, which is especially helpful when there isn't a part of the UI showing you the upcoming pieces. It not being here was only a minor inconvenience though.

- I found myself receiving the same pieces several times in a row which made certain boards of the game particularly difficult to deal with. It's standard for the sequence generator to instead of just picking what a piece should be randomly, but to instead generate [sequences or bags from the set of pieces](http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Generator) to make it feel more fair to a player, and not like they're being screwed around by the RNG.

I am aware that just because something is standard, you don't necessarily want to implement it, or have time to do so in a particular version, and you might consider that some of these suggestions would not work in this particular game. I just happened to find them bothersome due to being an avid Tetris player, and feeling their omission made the game needlessly difficult.

You nailed it @dillon! Each of the recommendations you gave would certainly have left the player with smoother experience. The only one I didn't have in the back of my mind (in some spirit) writing the game would have been the ghost image suggestion. The rest were left out due to time constraints. I was convinced of the first one pretty quickly after all the racket I was making on my mechanical keyboard playtesting.

Thanks for the fantastic feedback!

Nice idea how to create something such with such an old concept. And the new shapes of block makes gameplay more unpredictable. Good job!

Well done! :)
The new shapes made the game more challenging, which I liked. I somehow found it a little slow, so maybe you could make everything go faster or allow letting the blocks fall or holding the down arrow to not have to press it multiple times. With a faster pace your twist would really come to shine, I think.

It sure is a good idea for the theme but I'm not sure the hold button itself is enough to refresh tetris gameplay. I still had a good time trying to play with the limit. Holding the space bar was a bit annoying ( gamers get tired fast :D )

Great iteration on an old classic! I particularly enjoyed the "hold" mechanic and found the graphics charming. A little sound and catchy music would make this game even better. Thanks for sharing.

With more polish the HOLD mechanic could be a great add to the tetris classic. The pieces are very difficult to fit together tho. Overall, good work.

Well, as a Tetris player I have to be deadly honest. The controls sucks, and that you can't change them sucks even more. You even have to mash down to soft drop the piece! As for the different polyminoes used, I'd rather see some more lenient generator for the piece sequence, specifically a one that wouldn't spam cross pentominoes. Also, seeing next piece would be nice. The theme is completely unused.

Thankfully, these are solvable problems. If you want to keep working on this game, and I hope you will, I'll give you some tips. First, join the Tetris community and ask for testing. You will get some valuable feedback, even if some of it might be harsh. Second, you should rename the HOLD to FREEZE or something, just because there is already something called hold piece in Tetris. Third, make control settings screen, allow for two rotation buttons, and fix the soft drop so we won't have to mash. Fourth, design a decent randomizer, which is needed to fight unfair level of randomness in this case.

Interesting concept. I like that you threw in some new pieces because that shook up the formula enough for me to dive in deeper. I like the hold mechanic but I don't think it fits in well with Tetris because like you said, there's no reason not to hold down the button and just let go when you're in trouble. I think it might be a better mechanic in something like a Tetris Attack/Puyo Puyo style game with falling blocks because that'll give you the ability to set up complicated chains you couldn't do in the normal mode. I appreciate the attempt to reinvigorate a classic game though, it makes you really think outside the box to surprise people.