gridlock
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GRIDLOCK is a simple game in the classic arcade style which fuses the tried-and-true formulas of Tetris, Whack-a-Mole and Dance Dance Revolution into a totally new puzzle/action experience.

Two triplet sets of tracks intersect at right angles at the center of the screen to create a grid. Above this grid floats a 3x3 grid of square-shaped buttons, each of which corresponds to an intersection point below. Colored blocks slide along the rails in pairs, meeting up at the intersection points where they overlap for a few brief seconds during which they are vulnerable to being destroyed. It is up to the player to destroy the colored blocks by “pressing” down on the square buttons floating above, as well as by collecting various power-ups (some helpful, some a hindrance).

Any blocks that are missed pass through the 'kill-zone' to collect in 'pens' on the far sides of the screen. Once blocks have started to collect in the pens the only way to clear them is to match them with other, same-colored blocks. In this way, once a block has been missed, the player must intentionally avoid destroying like-colored blocks in order to clear the pens, while keeping the unwanted blocks from passing through. As soon as any one of the pens overflows the game is over.

Players are rewarded for their speed and accuracy in destroying the blocks, as well as for destroying groups of blocks in special 'combos'. Our hope is that skilled players will be able to maximize their score by strategically allowing only certain colored blocks to pass through unharmed in order to build up volatile clusters of blocks to be destroyed all at once for massive amounts of bonus points.

Various special effect techniques will be employed to help 'spice-up' the essentially planar nature of the game. For example, game elements will be rendered onto separate sheets which are then spherically distorted according to their perceived depth before being rendered into the final screen buffer (not unlike the layers of an onion). Camera motion will also be damped as a function of sheet depth to create a parallax effect. All in all, these techniques should be effective in creating an exciting pseudo-3D game world into which the core game elements and a multitude of other miscellaneous sprite-based special effects can be easily inserted, without the CPU overhead of rendering in true 3D.

We have chosen to program the game in Java, making use of the 'full-screen exclusive' mode offered by the Java API, with eventual plans to port to C++ and JavaME.