If you played InvadTris in the last few days, if you only played the HTML5 build, you may have noticed a variety of issues, such as glitched sprites, lack of sound effects, slow performance, and keyboard press event detection issues.

I've released an update, 1.8, which addresses most of these issues. The game should now be a lot more playable. Except in IE11, which is still slow and doesn't handle audio for some reason. I don't have Windows 10, so haven't been able to test it on Edge, so if anyone has played it in Edge, I'd love to hear how it ran for you.

I'm a bit torn on whether I should continue to try to support HTML5 browsers with my GameMaker projects, due to the number of limitations and issues that browsers seem to have running GameMaker projects. It seems that most people prefer not to download a Windows-native build and run it, but if the result is that more people play my games in the browser, only to have a markedly inferior experience as a result, it doesn't seem like a very good trade-off. The best way to play the game remains to download the .exe and run it as a native Windows application. Web play seems to be acceptable in the latest Chrome and Firefox, at least on my hardware. YMMV.

Other improvements in recent builds include a much-improved Tetris control set, which now includes wall-kicks, and sound effects for rotating the block and for 4-line clears. I've also added stats tracking for the Tetris pieces. I'm continuing development on this until I have reached what I feel is the ultimate expression of my concept, and this may take me a while to achieve, but it's been very enjoyable for me to work on this. Currently, the play experience is slightly disjointed, as many have commented it feels like playing two games side by side rather than one unified game, but as I continue to develop this game towards its ultimate expression I believe that this will be taken care of.

I hit 20 ratings almost within 24 hours of uploading my 1.0 build, but since that time my play rate has declined dramatically to a trickle of maybe 1-2/day, and as of today I've still received only 38 reviews. Which is not bad, but I think this game is good enough that it deserves more plays. The ways in which Space Invaders and Tetris gameplay compliment each other is interesting. Both feature things that move downward from the top of the screen and which need to be cleared before they overwhelm you. It's unexpected that their designs should echo each other in subtle ways like this, but they do, despite being from seemingly incompatible genres, but it's a delight to me that my work is revealing these similarities, and that the two games mash up so well.

Play InvadTris