Spirit Drop

Spirit Drop
Spirit Drop's logo
Developer(s)	Aaron Griffin
Platform(s)	Windows, Linux
Release	February 16, 2021
Latest release	v0.1.1.10 / August 15, 2021
Gameplay info
Next pieces	7 (default)
Playfield size	10 × 40 (default)
Hold piece	Yes (default)
Hard drop	Yes (default)
Rotation system	Omnikick

Spirit Drop is a downloadable, free to play stacker with a focus on control and self-improvement. Featuring extensive single-player variety with its 5 Singleplayer modes, Spirit Drop also has 3 tamer Practice modes akin to those in other stackers. Multiplayer is implemented extensively, with team modes, a builtin CPU, practically no limit of total players in a given room, and more planned for future releases.

Single Player

Singleplayer is slated to release across five "acts", with the final one releasing Spirit Drop V1.0. Of the twelve planned modes, five are implemented today. In each implemented singleplayer mode, players can "Transcend" and "Ascend" and earn "Purification"/"Ascension" points respectively by either performing exceedingly well in one playthrough, or by gradually qualifying for points by improving your average scores by some amount. Purification and Ascension points are currently cosmetic, but will influence later singleplayer modes once they're implemented.

In most singleplayer modes, players are allowed to enable "Struggle Mode". In Struggle Mode, if you Top out, the board is cleared and you're allowed to keep playing. If you top out again without clearing at least two rows inbetween your last top out, you will game over. Otherwise, the game will revive you once more and allow you to continue playing. If Struggle Mode is enabled, players will be unable to Ascend or earn qualifications for Ascension. Scores created under Struggle Mode will be distinctively split in the ingame leaderboards. If you've enabled Struggle Mode in Rise, you must instead clear 5 garbage rows before being allowed to revive.

Pull

“Fight devastating gravity and shrinking lock delay”

—Ingame tooltip

Pull is a typical Marathon-esque gamemode, where your main objective is total score earned. After clearing ten rows, you'll level up, which increases gravity/removes lock delays near the later levels and multiplies score earned. As an endless gamemode, in the early stages of Pull, you must clear lines efficiently, whereas near the endgame, you must simply survive extreme gravity conditions such as those found in "Master mode" games. Spirit Drop calls these gravity conditions, commonly known as 20G, "∞G"

Fall

“Build carefully with gradually increasing gravity and no move or rotation resets”

—Ingame tooltip

Fall is much more like NES-based stackers such as Tetris (NES, Nintendo). In this mode, players level up once every 10 rows. Fall mode possesses the following differences from the regular allowed actions:

• You only have 1 Next queue
• Holding is disabled
• You can no longer Hard Drop; attempting to do so will simply initiate a Soft Drop.
• Handling is restricted to 250 miliseconds of DAS, and 100 miliseconds of ARR, even if your settings are above this limit.
• There are no Lock Resets, which means locking works identically to most "classic" stackers.

To compensate for the increased difficulty, Fall mode has a much more generous gravity curve, which never reaches ∞G. Fall mode also allows full usage of Spirit Drop's custom kicktable, Omnikick, if you can perform kicks within the alloted lock delay. "Tuck" moves are officially recognized, as are Twists, Back-to-Backs, and All Clears.

Rise

“Clear the unstoppable asynchronous rising garbage”

—Ingame tooltip

Rise works similarly to Jstris's "Survival" mode, where garbage is routinely entering the board, and it's your job to simply survive as long as possible or go for the highest score while doing so. Stark differences include:

• Garbage enters from an always active timer, meaning garbage will often enter the board during active pieces
  • In this timer, you can predict the upcoming garbage row's column before it's accessible
• There will always be two rows of garbage from the bottom of the field. If you clear one or two of those rows, garbage will instantaneously enter the board to fill the lowest 2 rows with garbage.
• Depending on the height of the garbage, garbage will interactively generate cheesier,(when you're near the bottom) or very cleanly.(when you're near the top and in danger of topping out)
• In this mode, players level up once every 10 garbage rows cleared

Dynamic

“Perform well to increase the speed of the game”

—Ingame tooltip

Dynamic is Spirit Drop's flagship arcade mode, with inspirations by the TGM Series present. While it uses the default kick tables and RNG, "Levels" are instead portrayed as "Power". Power is attained by nearly any action that generates score: placing pieces and clearing lines with bonuses added for Twist clears, Back-to-Backs, All Clears, and Combos. The higher your Power, the higher your Score multiplier and gravity. The rate at which this multiplies score cannot be understated: as of writing, the Dynamic World Record, held by Maniac Tetro48, is 192,594,511.

Struggle Mode is replaced by an "Arcade Mode" toggle in Dynamic. In Arcade Mode, players can hold up to 5 lives and start with 3. Lives are awarded occasionally throughout the game. While arcade mode is enabled, players are required to start with 0 Power. Ascension is also allowed under Arcade Mode.

Evolution

“Explore the branching paths featuring several categories of missions”

—Ingame tooltip

Evolution is Spirit Drop's distinctive mode, although it may be compared to the likes of Cultris II's campaign and A Gnowius' Challenge. In Evolution, players are asked to do a variety of challenges across its 18 themed missions. Each mission is split into three challenges, and of those challenges, players will have four available objectives to clear depending on prior cleared objectives.

Objectives can range from the following difficulty designations in order:

• Master - 8 Grade points
• Expert - 7 Grade points
• Ultra Hard - 6 Grade points
• Super Hard - 5 Grade points
• Very Hard - 4 Grade points
• Hard - 3 Grade points
• Medium - 2 Grade points
• Easy - 1 Grade point

Depending on which objective you clear, you'll advance to the next bracket of challenges, or to the next mission altogether. If you top out and haven't cleared any missions, you'll advance linearly as if you had cleared the Easy challenge, without gaining Grade points. If you've cleared any missions and top out, the highest difficulty you've cleared shall be chosen as the appropriate objective to advance with. Any lower objectives will be ignored for the purposes of advances and Grade points earned.

Practice

Practice is host to four game modes. In most, records are saved of your best runs, and added to a global leaderboard of all runs for comparison. Otherwise, they all generally follow established defaults, and don't bring many surprises to the table.

Line Race

“Clear 40 lines as quickly as you can!”

—Ingame tooltip

Line Race is a simple Sprint game mode. In it, players are asked to clear 40 lines with no delays present. A "subtype" setting hints towards a plan of adding further modes with added delays. Alongside your general personal best, Line Race also keeps track of your best run with "6-3 stacking" separately.

The current Spirit Drop Line Race World Record is 0.23.968, ran by fesh on the 15th of March, 2022.

Timed Turbo

“Generate score as quickly as you can!”

—Ingame tooltip

Timed Turbo is similar to general Ultra game modes, yet has very important differences that distinguish it from other games with competitive Ultra modes, like Jstris and TETR.IO. In the aforementioned games, "Looping openers" have become the dominating method in high-skilled gameplay; a playstyle some have declared boring or draining to do for long stretches of time. While getting a high score remains top priority, and while preserving a zero delay design, Spirit Drop aims to solve these problems with several large changes to the formula:

• Score is multiplied by an active level, such as in TETR.IO's Blitz mode. The target to level up is always changing. Instead of strictly clearing lines to level up, hints are taken from Singleplayer's Dynamic mode, and players can level up faster by performing Twist clears, Back-to-Backs, All Clears, and Combos.
• All-spin is enabled, like it is in other modes, and allows for very unique midgame setups.
• Timed Turbo employs a Back-to-Back chain multiplier, encouraging consistent difficult line clears.
• The piece randomizer changes midgame from the predictable 7-bag that creates the looping meta in other games to a far less consistent generator. Specifically:
  • x3-x5 - 7-bag
  • x6-x8 - 14-bag
  • x9-x11 - 5-memory w/ 2-bag drought prevention
  • x12 onward - 4-memory w/ 2-bag drought prevention

With these mechanics in place, the current World Record is 1,607,315, ran by Maniac Tetro48 on the 19th of December, 2022. The run in question is fully freestyle stacking.

Freeform All Clear

“Perform as many All Clears in a row as possible”

—Ingame tooltip

This mode is most similar to Jstris's "PC Mode", where players must make as many 4 line All Clears without having a stack that exceeds 4 rows at any moment. In Spirit Drop, the kick table can be a bit more permissive at times, and this mode implements its own All Clear checker to save time in board states where an All Clear is impossible, illustrating why your board state is incorrectly structured for an all clear. It is for that reason the mode may be seen as more beginner-friendly than other games.

The current Freeform All Clear World Record is 56 All Clears, ran by fesh on the 8th of July, 2021.

AI Versus

This mode allows you to play against Spirit Drop's enclosed AI player, as well as modify its behavior. Currently, you can fight against the bot in a 1v1, or engage in a round of Eliminations with up to 8,190 CPUs.(Although that's not recommended.) Right now, extra buttons exist for KO Race, Crown, Boss Battles, and Custom Rulesets. Matches played in this mode will have replays saved locally for your viewing, but will be kept solely to your computer—no leaderboards.

Trivia

• Spirit Drop has an extensive roadmap available ingame detailing plans leading up to its full release.
• Due to a quirk in development, some text forms, including user nicknames, allow text styling with TextMesh Rich Text. This quirk was semi-officialized as a feature within the game.