One idea and challenge that I had was to make the games fast-natured, without relying on excessive gravity.
I feel that a fast falling speed puts pressure on the player to make a decision and, while pro-players will be ok with it, new starters will surely struggle.
Other games provide the possibility to hard-drop a piece, docking it into place right after the fall, or soft-drop – increase the pace of falling. But this introduces an issue – having docked pieces with spaces underneath will result in a time penalty because of being force to soft-drop to pad the gap, or continue the game without immediately completing the line.
Also, there is also the challenge of being able to play accurately on mobile, where you can mostly use swipes and taps. So having 2 ways of dropping the piece could be cumbersome.
To keep the game quick, I’ve decided introduce a hard drop, with the ability to move the piece for about 100ms, before it becomes fully docked. This allows you to fill the under-gaps quite quick after creating them, and stay in the game, even if you were forced to place a piece inaccurately. This is how it looks, if you press “down arrow” followed by “left” or “right”.
I’ve removed the “space” key for hard dropping, and relying only on “down-arrow”, but I’m pondering whether to add it back, with the same function as “down-arrow”, since many users might be used to it.
For mobile, this effect is achieved by “swipe down” followed by quick left or right swipe.
Let me know what you think, and if you miss hard and soft drops.