Project #2: Brick Breaker

The next project will be Brick Breaker, and the deadline will be next Friday (the 4th of March). Matti and I discussed Tron and decided that we want to save it for when we are more skilled and can actually make it be the best we can.

So, Brick Breaker. Sitting down and thinking, Brick Breaker is a fairly simple game. We decided from the get-go that our focus is going to be on co-operative play. One player will reside at the top, and the other at the bottom. There will be walls on the left and right side, but other than that, the players will need to work together to make sure the ball does not go out of the play field.

So what does Brick Breaker involve? Well, we have bricks, two paddles, ball, and powerups. The paddles bounce the ball around to break the bricks, which in turn may drop powerups to increase scoring potential.

The bricks will be able to have multiple layers of defense. That is, they may have to be hit more than once. This will be shown to the player by way of color, and will be very intuitive.

Each player will control a paddle. The paddle will correspond to the player by way of color. One player will be blue, the other will be red. Thus, anything in the game world that is that color will be immediately recognizable to the players as belonging to that color player.

The ball will change color when a player hits it, so as to represent the last player to touch it. Each player has a separate score, and there is also a combined score, so the color of the ball will be important to obtain a greater score than your friend. This is competitive co-op, where both players work together, but also compete.

Powerups will randomly spawn from bricks. Depending on who hit the brick, the color of the powerup will change to the player of the opposite color. Only that player will be allowed to actually collect the powerup. The powerup will act the same as the ball -- only it cannot break bricks, and also cannot collide with the ball or other powerups. Once the powerup touches the paddle of its' color, both players will get that powerup.

The game will feature a multiplier so as to make scoring more interesting. Every time the ball touches a brick, the player will score X points. Every time the ball breaks a brick, the player will score Y points. Additionally, every time the ball touches a brick, the multiplier will increase slightly. The way that this works is there will be a bar at the bottom of the screen, accompanied by text saying the current multiplier. The bar will increase in fullness until it is full, and then the multiplier will go up by one. The multiplier will then multiply into every point scoring.

Finally, I've spent a bit of time thinking about what kind of art I'd like to see in this game. Something I really like is when people draw their art as pencil sketches on paper, and then scan it in. I think it looks very cool, and I think it fits very well with these old games. I'll see if Skyler is available to do the art for this game. If he isn't, I have a scanner, and Matti's friend might be able to help out.

So, as you can see, this project is a lot more ambitious than Snake was. Consider Snake our warm-up, I expect that this game will turn out quite nice.

I'll post again when we've made some progress.