Tetzle is alive!

Good news Tetzle fans: your long wait for updates is finally over! I have been working on a variety of enhancements to the game during the past several days, and all of them are now available in the git repository. Some of them break backwards compatibility with the current release, so the next version of Tetzle will be 2.0 instead of 1.3.

The biggest visual change is the replacement of the beveled edges (which, to be honest, I never liked that much) with drop shadows! I originally wanted to use drop shadows, but at the time I couldn’t think of a fast way to add them. It turns out that a simple trick is all I needed: render blurry squares under the outside tiles of a piece. 🙂

A related change is the fact that the tiles are now always 32 pixels wide and 32 pixels tall; never larger and never smaller. This means that if you want to see a larger version of the image, play with more pieces! Smaller boards now use less video RAM, so they should play better on slow computers.

I have also improved the algorithm that creates the puzzles themselves. The current version of Tetzle uses a hack of building puzzles out of groups of 8x8 tiles that make interlocking pieces. The new and improved version of the code creates a puzzle of fully interlocking pieces. It even respects aspect ratios to a much better degree than before. In fact, if the aspect ratio of the image is 4x3 it will always use the entire image, otherwise it will use almost the entire image.

Worry not Tetzle fans, these are not the only changes coming; stay tuned for more updates! In the meantime, here is a screenshot of the development version of Tetzle: