Modest Bricks

Modest Bricks gameplay video

Modest Bricks is a Tetris clone. Originally written in 2005, it uses SDL 1.2 and the SDL_Mixer library for sound effects and music. This was one of the first “serious” games I wrote – though I did a number of QBasic and Visual Basic things before, I had never attempted a game in C, or with this level of polish. I wrote this for a few reasons:

  • Learn SDL and practice game dev in C, tools used (at the time) by Professionals to make Real Games
  • Make the source available so I could teach and demonstrate SDL to the University of Arkansas Game Development Club, a group I helped co-found around the same time.
  • Follow the advice of this GameDev.net tutorial, “How do I make games?” which recommended to start small by creating a polished version of Tetris to get the basics down and have something to show.
  • Put my music into a game!

Recently I took an interest in revamping some old code, and ended up rewriting much of this. The effort is complete so I’m releasing it. A Windows version is included in the .zip below, as well as the source code in C. Recompiling on *nix should be easy: cc `sdl-config --libs --config` -lSDL_Mixer -o modest main.c should be reasonably close, assuming SDL and SDL_Mixer development libraries installed.

Probably the most interesting thing about this game is that after writing, I pushed it to the SDL webpage, which (at the time) had a gallery for people to post their games Made With SDL. From there it caught the attention of a Dreamcast homebrew developer Ian Micheal, who was porting SDL games to the DC. He altered the graphics and added more sounds and cool effects to create “Ghouls ‘N TriX” – a Tetris game for the Dreamcast! It was really cool to know my code was running on a video games console, and I made sure alllll my friends knew about it 🙂

Download the game:

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