A floor kick, like a wall kick, happens when a player rotates a piece when no space exists in the squares where that tetromino would normally occupy after the rotation when rotating against the floor opposed to a wall. To compensate, the game sets a certain number of alternative spaces for the tetromino to look. Floor kicks first appeared in later TGM games because 20G made some tetrominoes difficult to manage.
Rotating a flat-side-down tetromino against a flat floor often requires a floor kick. Examples from the bounding box style rotation system used by Lockjaw: The Overdose:
Start |
Rotating would |
So nudge it up | |||
Start |
Rotating would |
So nudge it up |
Games using TGM rotation do not need the same floor kick for T as described above because the J, L, S, T, Z normally rotate to keep a constant bottom edge. However, these games need floor kick in a different circumstance where bounding-box systems do not:
Start |
Rotating would |
So nudge it up |
TGM1, TGM2, TAP does not perform floor kick. TGM3 in classic (TGM rotation) mode does so only for I and T, but not for JLSZ yet despite being theoretically necessary. No diagonal floorkick is supported.
Abuse[]
In many games, when the player rotates the active tetromino to kick it up one square, rotates it back, and lets the tetromino fall and land again, the lock delay resets. This prevents the tetromino from ever locking and prevents the player from ever topping out. The CPU opponent in The New Tetris has been seen to do this.
For this reason, some games restrict the number of floor kicks performed per tetromino. Tetris DS in multiplayer mode will lock the tetromino after a few seconds. TGM3 allows only one floor kick per tetromino:
Start |
Rotating would |
Floor kick works |
Rotate again, |
Floor kick |
A modified version of step reset could work where the lock delay only resets when moving below the last lock delay reset.
Constant floorkick[]
Tetris Best 2 has constant floorkicks. They only occur if one of the three wallkick positions succeed. This would allow some very unique twists.