Falling Blocks You Move to Make Lines

Falling Blocks You Move to make lines is a clone of a game we all know and love. It is one of the recommended "first step" games for all budding game developers and making one with XNA is extremely straightforward and easy.

The game itself took me about a weekend to write (and about 2 months for me to finally post it and re-do it in Beta 2). I have written Tetris clones before so I had the knowledge of how to do it, but XNA still took away so much of the early project work typically associated with making a game. I was working on game logic basically right from the start and that makes all the difference in the world..

So how does it play?

The gameplay for "Falling Blocks You Move to Make Lines" is fairly simple and pretty familiar. Blocks begins falling int a square playing area and you must move those block around and rotate them to make complete lines. Making a "line" of blocks makes that line disappear and increases your score.

Keyboard:

Up - rotate the Block
Down - move the Block down
Left - move the Block to the left
Right - move the Block to the right
P - Pause/UnPause the game
Space - start/re-start the game
Escape - exit the game

My goal for this game is to slowly being creating tutorials in a step by step process showing how to build a game like this using XNA. By the end of the tutorials you should understand how to re-create the game on your own from Project start to end. For those who don't like to wait though, the source have been made available so you can start dissecting the code now.

What kinds of things can you learn from the source code?

In Falling Blocks You Move to Make Lines, I work with Sound, moving sprites, displaying text on the screen, scoring, levels, creating an intro screen, dealing with "Pause", keyboard input, Game Over and game states. The code is well commented and attempt to follow good Object Oriented practices so it should be easy on the eyes.