An extendable tetris.

So, I've been working on a pet project of mine - a web-based, expendable tetris game. I want to allow people to create their own shapes, and their own rules for the removal of blocks from the game grid.

I'm doing in in Ruby on Rails, and so far I have an editor for the shapes, and will be working on the game mechanics more here in the next few days.

There's nothing live yet (I don't even have a domain for it, I may end up hosting it off of my own machine for a bit at the start...), so even if this sounds really interesting to you, too bad. If you are reading this, and would be interested in testing when I get something . . . testable done, just comment or drop me an email (it's on my profile page)

It's a good exercise in abstraction - there are a whole lot of games that are very similar to tetris. Blocks fall, stuck together in a shape. Sometimes blocks get removed from the screen. They may get removed when they fill a certain shape (in the case of classical tetris, one entire row), or maybe when a certain number of the same colored blocks come into contact with one another. Blocks might fall down after removal as if gravity was in play, they might not, etc.

Some things I'd like to implement:

* I'd like people to be able to mark existing shapes, or game rules for use in a game they are defining.

* I'd like people to be able to rate games.

* I'd like to be able to attach different attributes to games, or to shapes - for instance, a game where gravity was skewed a bit towards the left, making your piece drag. Or maybe adding a rotational velocity to certain shapes.

I haven't really been working on this for very long - I need to get a base amount of pluggable functionality implemented (which is a good bit of javascript and rails work), but once that's done the rest of implementation should move pretty fast. I guess I'll post updates as I move along here, since I don't really use this blog for all that much.