Disclaimer: I'm not a game programmer. I have always had an interest in game programming, even before I knew how to program, but I've never fully pursued that interest beyond a couple college projects.

I'm a business software / information systems developer. At least that's what I've been working on for the past 22 years.

This blog series is my attempt to learn more about game programming by implementing a clone of one of the simplest and most well known video games, Tetris. I'll be using plain vanilla Javascript because the modern web browser is one of the most accessible programming environments and it provides graphics capabilities via the Canvas API.

In order to learn the fundamentals of game programming, I'll be writing this game from scratch and implementing my own "engine" components as needed. Alternatively, I could use an existing game engine like Phaser or PixiJS but that wouldn't be as much fun, interesting, or challenging. Ultimately, I just wouldn't learn as much. So I'll stick with the custom-built engine.

I'll call the game BlockAttack so that I have a generic non-trademarked name to use to refer to my specific implementation of a Tetris-style game.

The first several posts will probably involve setting up the core systems that I need. For example:

• Animation
• Handling Input
• The Game Loop
• Managing Processes & Events
• Managing Game State(s)

Once these core systems are in place, I'll be able to move on to implementing the specifics of the BlockAttack game rules and gameplay mechanics. It's very likely that this will result in an iterative process of building gameplay and updating the core systems to support the gameplay needs.

When the game (and blog series) is complete, I might even extract the reusable parts into a primitive game engine, but we'll see if I get that far.

The project source code will be highlighted and explained in each blog post as I discuss each aspect of the game implementation and the full source code will always be available on GitHub.

BlockAttack GitHub Repository

My current plan is to post to this blog series at least once a week. If I have more time, I may be able to do two posts a week.

In the next post I will work on building a basic animation system using the Canvas API.

Thanks for reading :)

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Welcome to my new website. This is my first blog post.