Brandon LaRouche

Software Engineer. #RobloxDev. Maker of ROBLOX Apps. Author of Roblox Lua Books. iOS/Mac Developer, Founder of Double Trouble Studio. 28

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

@keithvlucas Congrats on the book!

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

@PoptartNoahh Very cool!

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

@rblx_tyridge77 This was a great read, super insightful! It’s awesome you took a little time to share your experience

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

No new updates to share… I realized I need to be able to detect tetris combos and b2b chaining for calculating scores and garbage to send during 1v1 play. So I am working on this, it’s just more state complications. I figure this is the last work needed for solo play anyways.

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

Time to iron out matchmaking. I want to port a lua system I have from years ago to see how it still works…

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

More progress being made today and yesterday! Wasted hours trying to figure out why the game Heartbeat started dropping from 60fps while a long game of tetris was being played

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

Thankfully I used the ScriptProfiler to narrow it down to my main Provider/Reducer (I’m using roblox-ts and Roact) where I didn’t have a dispatch call wrapped in useEffect correctly so it wasn’t cleaning up correctly between renders.

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

More progress on core mechanics:
- Hold piece
- Visualizes next four pieces
- Added two rows of negative space at the top of the board
- Switched to SRS for rotation positions

Getting close to having all the functionality ready for me to do matchmaking… and making it look nice

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

Also implemented a particle effect when you clear rows!

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

Added a “shaking” effect when you hard drop piece… feels pretty satisfying.

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

(3/3) I'm using roblox-ts and Roact+Reflex for passing context around the app. I'm focusing first on the basic gameplay mechanics and extendable control systems. Then I can make it super snappy and satisfying and give it some Roblox flair with a 3D hub.

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

(1/3) Last week I started a Tetris-inspired game. The true aim is to support the competitive 1v1 leagues I've seen online.

I watched my younger brother-in-law play tetrio all winter break and was inspired by how addictive it was to watch him play.

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

(2/3) This is a slightly outdated progress video, but it was super satisfying to finally render the block stacking after grinding out state management logic. #RobloxDev

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

@sleitnick This is so cool!

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

I definitely need to update the Readme's for these packages if downloads continue to pick up. They are probably a bit outdated or at least don't highlight every improvement I've made recently

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

UIBlox on the other hand has been useful in making my Roact component development as re-usable as possible... especially with my theming system that makes assigning styling more like HTML classnames (kinda).

https://t.co/arYtN1wQu4

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

The createstyles+makestyles functions make defining "classnames" easy. Then I can use a classNames helper method to combine styles or conditionally apply them based on states.

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

Eventually, I plan to make my storyblox package into a plugin. It's already sped up a log of my UI development in projects. It feels much more natural to me since I already have experience writing stories for React-TS web projects
https://t.co/XiGYrhNPjS

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

Small projects like this are fun and let me iterate on my storyblox and uiblox npm packages for rbxts

[Brandon LaRouche @cowbear16]

At the end of last year, I implemented a 2D cell-based pathfinding system with a visualization UI. It has a few algorithms -- Dijkstra, BFS, DFS #RobloxDev