Help Kickstart ‘Groove’, a Totally Groovy New ‘Tetris’ and ‘Lumines’ Inspired Puzzle Game

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Christopher Christensen — A.K.A. Chris Chris, and also a former student of Digipen — recently sought to update a student project he previously made into a fully fledged experience for both PCs and Mobile Devices. It was to this end that he recently approached Kickstarter with a request for the humble sum of $2,250, all so that he could cover licensing fees — music production costs — and various platform release fees. Assuming that everything goes as planned — with over $650 being secured so far, and 21 days still remaining — Chris Chris plans to spend an entire summer developing Groove via Unity 5, and afterwards release the completed app later this August.

Although the best way to fully understand Chris Chris’s plans for Groove would be to play the freely available demo he developed at Digipen, what follows is my best attempt to sum up his intriguing puzzle game:

In Groove you’ll find yourself in a situation rather similar to Tetris, wherein you’ll have to manage falling blocks — which you may freely rotate — in an attempt to ensure that your playing field never fills up. However — unlike Tetris — you’ll only ever be given blocks that are perfectly two-by-two in shape, with the individual squares making up each block randomly being either red or blue. Furthermore, these blocks — whenever they touch down — will have their component parts keep falling until everything has fully settled (meaning that, unlike Tetris, you’ll never be left with garbage blocks floating in mid-air).

Pic_3Your goal is to form a solid stripe — of either red or blue — that reaches fully from one side of the playing field over to the other, and the path taken doesn’t even have to be remotely straight in the slightest. Once you’ve achieved this, that entire strip will be removed from the playing field (and afterwards — should any new solid stripes be available — they’ll be immediately removed also). This objective might seem deceptively simple at first, but you’ll quickly discover that successfully drawing a solid-line across the entire playing field is a far harder objective than succeeding at Tetris ever was.

Aiding the player in this endeavor are two equally off-beat mechanics, the first of which allows any piece to be placed with half of itself hanging off the stage’s edge (with the out-of-bound segment becoming forever lost). The other method lets you instantaneously remove all blocks of one color — either red or blue — from the playing field a single time, with an additional destructive charge being added for every 250 points earned. Although other changes may be coming before the game is finished, I can’t personally comment on those as they weren’t functionally present within the Digipen Demo that I got to test run.

Anyways — should you now find yourself to be intrigued — you may secure your very own launch day copy of Groove for just $2, with the backer being allowed to freely choose whether they wish to receive an iOS or PC copy of the finished product. Meanwhile — for those extra interested in helping Chris Chris out — additional backer rewards include: beta access, your name in the credits, a digital copy of the game’s soundtrack, and much more. Those interested — however — must be sure to chip in their donations before June 23rd rolls around, or else they run the ultimate risk of becoming forever unable to ever properly get their Groove on.