Thursday, June 4, 2009

GWT Tetris - Great Puzzle Game from the 80s



I am sure there are some of you out there that have never heard of the puzzle game Tetris. Seems like the 1980s was just a few years ago, ah how time flys. I first played the game Tetris on my Tandy Color Computer 3, and played and played. I absolutly loved the game! Funny, I still love the Color Computer too. Here is a screen shot of Tetris on the Color Computer:

Some time ago I tought it would be a fun little project to take the game Tetris and write a GWT version of it. Well now someone has already done it. A few days ago on the Google Web Toolkit Group I noticed a post about Tetris. I had to give it a try, and I was quite impressed with the result:

I had a chance to talk to the author Janusz Prokulewicz and asked him a few questions about the development of this game.

Some time ago Janusz created a Java version of his Tetris game. Having created the same game as a linux shell application over 4 years ago he was able to get his Java version working in three days. So the real question, how hard was it to convert to GWT and how long did it take? To quote Janusz: "It took me 2 and a half days (or rather nights) to do it".

So we have an existing Java application that Janusz was able to convert it to GWT in two nights. The game can now be played in any modern browser with no special plug-ins and no goofy browser quirks to worry about. Write it once in GWT and compile and you are ready to go.

Unfortunately at this time he does not have a web site that contains his other work, maybe in the future he can set something up.

He used GWT version 1.6.4 with no additional libraries.
The game is deployed with a PHP backend using JSON to get/send data to the server.

Janusz's web site is here.

Update June-8-2009: Janusz now has a blog setup. You can see his site here.