Parrises Squares - nuwen.net

Parrises Squares is a 2D puzzle game written in C++ and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Invoking parrises or double-clicking the executable will run the game at 1600x1200x32. Invoking parrises 1280 will use 1280x960x32, and so forth.

Controls

Movement - Mouse, Arrow Keys
Fire - Left Click, Space, Enter
Pause/Unpause - P
Quit - Escape

Gameplay

Random new pieces appear at a constant rate.
When the board fills up, the game ends.
Any connected cluster of identically colored pieces can be removed by firing on any piece of the cluster.
Diagonal adjacency is not considered.
Clusters which consist of a single piece may not be removed (duh).
If an N piece cluster is removed, N² points are awarded.
When a cluster is removed, the remaining pieces collapse in a predictable manner: first they fall down, then they are compacted to the left.

Strategies

Try to build up huge clusters by selectively avoiding the elimination of a particular color.
Avoid creating checkerboard regions of different colors. It is extremely hard to erode such regions once they form.
If the board is nearly empty, holding down A will create new pieces at a very fast rate and will award one point per piece.

Known Issues

If vsync is not enabled, the board may fill up with pieces at an extremely fast rate.
If active, Winamp will attempt to display itself over the game screen. I am told Winamp does this with other games, including Warcraft III. Therefore, this issue is probably not fixable, especially by me.
Print Screen works, and Alt-Tab changes focus away from the game. However, Alt-Tabbing back into the game does not work.
When paused, keyboard movement is ignored. However, mouse movement remains silently active, so the cursor can teleport when the game is unpaused.
Sound does not work on platforms other than Windows, despite my best efforts.

New Issues

If you have discovered a new issue with the game, please contact me.

Source Code

The source code for Parrises Squares is reasonably clean and well structured. The graphics engine is utterly resolution-independent. I am rather proud of the input routines; they handle simultaneously pressed arrow keys perfectly. If you use the source code to build a different 2D game, I would be interested to hear about it.

The Name

Parrises Squares is the name of a game occasionally referred to but never shown in Star Trek: The Next Generation and later series. The game is said to be rather dangerous; occasionally, its participants are injured. Of course, this has nothing to do with my puzzle game. I just needed a name for it, and I didn't want to call it Insane Game, after the TI-85 game it is a clone of. Parrises Squares is the first Trek reference that came to my mind.

http://nuwen.net/parrises.html
Stephan T. Lavavej
stl@nuwen.net
Updated a long time ago.