I know this is prolly a hard question as there are numerous tetris clones, but what do they use for speed times? Is there a standard that was adopted or all they all different? For instance what is the starting block fall speed and what is the increments or increment equation? Whats the second per tiles speed basically? Thanks much! --Brad

I think it's pretty arbitrary. It shouldn't be so fast that the user can't properly control the block. Maybe 10 seconds from top to bottom at level 1?

The wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris) has a lot of good info on the "standards" of Tetris, but it doesn't mention block falling speed. I don't think there is a standard.

I did a tetrisy clone once, here are the numbers I used:

Really easy: 1000 millisecond delay for one tile space
Easy: 750 ms
Average: 500 ms
Hard: 300 ms

Here(www.colinfahey.com/tetris/) is a good reference for building classic tetris clones. Check out section 5.10 for the information you might need. The page is mainly built around the AI but has a lot of other interesting tetris topics.

Good Luck.

I started mine at 1 second per line, then I took off 1/3 of the current speed for each level.

IE:
currentSpeed = 1.0;//seconds
speedChange;

Then at each level interval I did:
speedChange = currentSpeed/3;
curretnSpeed -= speedChange;

I think this is a pritty good setup. I have only been able to get to lvl 8 with this, and I'm pritty good. :)

A good way to decide for yourself, is to set the speed as you want it at lvl 10, or your max level. ( In my game you go from 1-10, then you win) Then scale it down to level 1.

So if at your max levle, you want it to have almost no delay, then you take .001, and add to it, per level, until you come up with your starting level.

So in my game it scales like this...

lvl - speed(estimated)
1 - 1
2 - .66
3 - .44
4 - .29
5 - .19
6 - .12
7 - .08
8 - .05
9 - .03
10 - .02

This might seem real fast, but I also have a .25 second slide timer, so the user can slide the blocks, and then with the calculations involved, it's not too bad.

Besides, beating the game should be hard, but as stated earlier, it really is arbitrary. What do YOU think is fair? Set your maximum speed, then scale down to lvl 1.