Meet The Newest Game That Will Take Over Your Life
Now that the 2048 craze is finally dying down and you thought you'd get back to your productive self, a new contender called Hextris has entered the ring.
Hextris is a simple reincarnation of Tetris in hexagon form. Meaning that colored lines will fall down from six sides towards a central hexagon, and you need to rotate the hexagon to get the colors to match. If you get three or more lines of the same color in a row, they disappear and you get some points.
If you're playing on a desktop, you rotate the hexagon clockwise by pressing the right arrow and counter-clockwise by clicking the left arrow.
And don't worry, there's already an iOS and Android version for phones and tablets. For the mobile version, you just touch the left side of the screen to rotate the hexagon counter-clockwise and the right side of the screen to rotate it clockwise.
As the game progresses, the falling lines speed up and you become even more determined in your rotating. When you eventually can't keep up and the hexagon fills with colored lines, the game is over. And then you start over, obviously.
Hextris was initially created by four high school kids from Boston at a "Wasted Time" themed hackathon. Garrett Finucane, Noah Moroze, Michael Yang, and Logan Engstrom joined together as Team Snowman and took home the gold at HackExeter 2014. Engstrom and Finuncane then refined, polished, and marketed the game, keeping it free, and open source.
Engstrom and Finuncane met at a robotics competition, and Finuncane brought along his two friends (Moroze and Yang) for the hackathon. After getting positive feedback at the hackathon, Engstrom and Finuncane decide to keep at it just to see it through, only expecting maybe 100 downloads or so. And now the game is already blowing up, having hit the top of Hackernews, Github, and Product Hunt.
"We had a few people tell us it was fun," Finuncane told Business Insider. "We spent a week on it and then we thought, 'We already spent a week we can't not finish it,' and then we spent a month and we were like 'We can't not finish it.'"
Both teenagers have had a lot of fun with Hextris and see coding as a fun hobby, but they don't plan on dropping out of high school any time soon.
"I think we see programming as something that's a way to express ourselves," Engstrom told Business Insider. "[But] I personally do not want to become a software engineer when I grow up. After you finish the first 10% of the game, it gets very tedious very fast because you just have to deal with little errors and bugs, and it's not fun to fix."
Here's a preview video of the game: