How to Play
Hit the ball with the paddle (using the arrow keys) to stop the blocks from touching the bottom or you will lose a life. Press the circle button to slow time.
Post-Mortem
This game started as a weekend project in august 2023 as a learning experience, it took a bit longer to complete than expected...
the goal of the practice was to make a simple game (breakout) play around with its design and add as much flash and spectacle as possible, as I noticed this lack of flash as being a weak point of my last game <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=53307">Tiny Bomber</a>.
there are some elements of this I think worked out really well, it looks super cool, with loads of subtle effects to really make the whole thing pop. This can make the game a little hard to follow at times but i think overall it works in the game's favor. I also really love some of the changes I made to breakout to make it feel more dynamic, with lives instead being lost when the blocks (which are now descending) touch the bottom. There is some lovely dynamic difficulty with the speed of the blocks there and it has a really nice ping pong between chill and tense, though the lack of precise control can make that frustrating at times.
Which brings us to the area I am not happy with with this game, that being the ability to control the ball specifically, and the collision system more generally. My goal initially was to make the physics system more "realistic" than the original game, and to try and have all the objects follow the same basic laws. This can create really cool effects, like how the knock back effect when a ball hits a block is the same code that makes the ball move when you hit it. However, it also caused problems, like how the ball can bounce off corners in unpredictable ways or how it eliminated precise control of the ball by altering the angle of the paddle.
Ultimately I hit a point where the collision system was too complicated to easily fix, but was unable to support the necessary tweaks needed to improve.
After a GREAT deal of tweaking I have forced the game into the best state I can get it into and so i am releasing it.
if anyone wants to take it and mess with the code feel free, I think I have gained all the learning I am going to get out of it now so it's time to move on to greener pastures...
Hopefully somewhere that doesn't have as convoluted a physics system.
-4dtri
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