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Stairs Sweep
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About the game
Stairs Sweep is a falling-block puzzle with a twist. Pieces drop into a narrow well one pair at a time, and a full horizontal row of boxes disappears, as you would expect. But some pieces bring little enemies with them, and enemies never vanish with a row: they stay put and pile up, blocking your well.
The only way to get rid of them is a ball. Now and then a ball comes down instead of a box, and once it lands it rolls along the stack and knocks out the enemies in its path, earning more points for every one it takes down in a row. Placing the balls well, and keeping a path open for them, is the heart of the game.
The Arduboy is normally held sideways, but this game uses its 128×64 screen upright, as a tall, narrow well. OBONO released it in October 2019.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open, credit-card-sized handheld with a tiny black-and-white screen: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator. On a real Arduboy you would turn the console on its side; here the screen is shown upright for you and the arrow keys follow it, so Up is up.
Pick a level on the title screen (Beginner, Novice or Standard) and press X. The game keeps your five best scores, play count and play time in the emulated memory of the Arduboy, which is saved in this browser automatically. F2 also saves the complete state of the game at any moment, and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Arduboy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Left / right | D-pad | move the falling pair |
| Up or X | D-pad / B | rotate the pair |
| Down | D-pad | drop faster |
| Z | A | menu (continue, restart, quit); on the title screen, sound on/off |
| X | B | choose on the title screen |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
Rows only clear boxes. Enemies stay behind when a row disappears, so a row that is full of boxes but has an enemy in it never clears. Keep enemies away from the rows you are building.
Make room for the ball. A ball knocks out every enemy it rolls into, and each one in the same run is worth more than the last. Leave a clear lane across the stack so the next ball can reach a cluster of enemies.
Drop fast for points. Holding Down adds a point for every step the piece falls, and saves time when you already know where it goes.
Credits and licence
Stairs Sweep was designed, programmed, drawn and scored by OBONO, who has been making small games for the Arduboy since 2016. It is free software under the MIT licence. It is built with the Arduboy Library 1.1.1 (BSD licence), which includes code from Adafruit's SSD1306 driver and Len Shustek's Playtune (MIT). The licence texts are linked from this page, and the source code is in the author's ArduboyWorks repository.