Teamtris

Cooperative tetris in three dimensions

What is Teamtris?

Being able to communicate with other people is a necessary skill for every human being. We want to make a game that helps people communicate better with each other. We decided on a game that is easy to learn and recognize. Everybody knows Tetris! But this game requires cooperation in a 3D game world.

Our goals were to promote communication and cooperation between players, and make a fun and addicting game that it both easy to learn and interesting to play over and over again.

"Really challenging, but fun", Oh, it's 3D!", "Great for making enemies!"

How does Teamtris work?

Teamtris is a game made for two players. Each player controls one 2D side of the same 3D tetris tower with the help of a Wii-mote, where they can move and rotate the falling block around one axis for each player. Together they must navigate the blocks in order to clear the playing field. Both players are dependent on each other in order to place the blocks, the difference between success and failure will be ability of the team to coordinate and communicate.

Challenges and lessons learned.

Something which we did not anticipate early on was how comparatively easy it would be to develop in Unity compared to raw OpenGL as some of us had done earlier. Even very difficult parts such as proper wiimote implementation worked almost flawlessly. Therefore we reached our preliminary goals unexpectedly soon which affected the rest of the development plans. Regarding the interactions, we initially estimated that players would naturally cooperate which they sometimes did, however we also had to adapt our interactions in order to facilitate cooperation in order for it to really work.

Furthermore we had to spend a lot of time regarding the difficulty and intuitiveness of the game, as many of our players either understood the game very quickly and performed well, or didn't understand the game quickly and thus performed worse. Having to design our interactions towards working for both of these groups was a challenge.