Okay here's the thing. I recently found out that the Tetris company has sent out threatening letters to other authors of Tetris clones, saying their games infringe on the "look and feel" of their product... that people could mistake it for the original, and that they'd have to remove it immediately, blah blah. Basically threatening to sue retroactively from what I understand, and take every cent you profited from your version(plus legal fees). Part of me says that's the lamest thing I've ever heard, but another part kind of thinks the guy that made it does deserve to make money off his idea without other people "stealing" it.

But that's the thing. Tetrads are a part of math. Anybody that's taken Geometry has probably learned about tetrads, and probably even played with real ones in class. The concept of blocks falling and connecting to other blocks is so basic, I don't think anyone could copyright that. But apparently he could sue if someone elses game copied the "look and feel" of the original. Though to be quite honest, how many different ways can one possibly draw dropping tetrads which fit together? You can throw in snazzy graphics, music, and sound, but it's still going to always be Tetris underneath.

Anyway, I thought I would charge $5 to compensate for the time and effort, along with all the graphics, sounds, and music I made. But now, it's not worth getting possibly threatened (or worse), so Electris will now be FREE.

I honestly don't mind giving it away, because I enjoy playing it, and have learned a lot (and come up with valuable routines for future projects), and want everyone else to be able to enjoy it. I just hope I don't get in trouble for even doing that though. Surely one can't get in trouble for giving away something they made, despite it being a clone of something else. We've all seen tons of clones of all our favorite games. The funny thing is, had I never been informed that what I was doing might possibly be illegal, I would have never thought another thing of selling it. I wasn't trying to say my game was the original Tetris. I'd admit to anyone I'm just making yet another clone of one of the most popular games ever. I just wanted to make a little money to help get better computer hardware, to make better games in the future. I was going to sell it for all my images, my sounds, my music, and maybe my addition of the whole electricity concept. But I was never trying to sell it for the underlying game itself. Oh well. Since I'm giving it away, hopefully I won't even get griped at for using a name that ends in "-tris".

So like I said, it'll stay free like it currently is. I won't have to bother adding in registration stuff, or making a seperate demo and full version. I guess there's my bright side to the story. ;) And of course it's good for you, because now you can play all the Electris you want! I'll continue to work on it and finish it like I planned, despite there not being a lot left to do. So speaking of which, let me actually get to talking about the next version.

Version 1.1 will be out anytime now. I've fully implented my ERF file format to store data in, so that there aren't tons of files to keep up with. There's just big files now that hold lots of different things. Compression still hasn't been added, but I can worry about that later. I'm still not 100% sure how I'll handle music yet either, but I'm sure I'll figure that out soon. The way things stand, I'd have to completely write my own streaming audio routines from scratch, to read the music continuously out of ERF files. I'll want to do it eventually anyway, but I don't think I'm going to make the new version of Electris wait for that. I may just leave the music part alone for now. If it aint broke, don't fix it.

I also found a bug or two that were causing occasional crashes at exit. I stomped'em out good. It was messy.

And ya know... it sucks when you play World's Scariest Police Chases for PSX for half an hour, then it freezes up and you'd have to do it all over again.


posted at 4:48 PM