OK, I have spent the subway ride to/from school, and some time during school figuring out my idea, and I have the main mechanic down. I’ll explain in a second, but first here are my rules/limitations/themes:

I will only be doing one of the rules, and that is making all my definitions palindromes. I will be limiting myself to a 5fps frame rate, and depending on how I decide to set up the controls, I might have a 1 or 2 button input. The theme isn’t so cut and dry; I will be making a tetris based game but it will still be a puzzle, so I will only count that as half a theme. The game will also implement a “playing backwards” theme, which I will count as half being the “inside out” theme.

I will be calling my game Ctrl-Z, and the mechanic is that the player gets to play tetris backwards. He/she will select 4 touching tiles from the “ground” as being the last played piece, and then the computer will “un-play” the resulting piece. In this way, the player goes backwards in time controlling not the motion of the pieces, but the destination. Obviously, I intend to include a couple of more engaging elements, such as limitations on your choice of pieces and appearing lines (as opposed to disappearing lines such as in tetris when you fill the line in question).

I mostly know what I’m doing, but I have a couple of things to still figure out (mainly control scheme, and algorithm for extracting pieces).

And now to work! I’ll update again when something gets done.

Till then

—
Mikhail Rudoy