Tetris Ace

charged with creating a game for older female gamers (35-50 years old or so), i set about interviewing mothers, including my own, hers, and some of my friends’. what i discovered from my research was that, overall, simplicity was the key factor. many moms cited the simple solitaire game that comes standard with windows as being their favorite game to play. my mom was quite the virtual mahjong player back when we had windows 3.1, and my grandmother absolutely loves tetris. as a result, i tried incorporating all these aspects into one game. my finished product, to the best of my ability, was called tetris ace.

the game starts off like tetris does, with a blank area, a falling piece, and a box showing the next piece. in tetris ace, instead of four small blocks being put together into several larger blocks, the falling pieces are the four different aces. each can be rotated and put together. if a line is made of all the same aces, it will vanish, just like tetris. but if two aces are the same, the player can click on them and make them vanish. 

i designed this game for the pc, but its control scheme is also suitable for the nintendo ds and wii. on the ds, players could use the d-pad to move aces and the stylus to select similar pieces. on the wii, the nunchuck control stick would move pieces, the b button would rotate cards, and the a button would select cards that the player points to with the cursor of the wiimote.