Visual Effects

Something that we neglected in Snake was to do any fun visual effects. The textures were there, and looked awesome, but there wasn't much in the way of animation or anything that really made the game feel alive. The background stood out as particularly bland, and really made it feel pretty lifeless.

In our Brick Breaker clone, I've added some funky little visual effects to make the game look more appealing. Even with Skyler's images, it still didn't look very alive -- and this is entirely due to the only two moving objects being a ball and a paddle.

Keeping with the simplistic "drawn on paper" look of the textures, and wanting more color, I've made a few adjustments to include some color.

When a ball hits a paddle, the ball inherits the paddles color, thus establishing "that ball is now belonging to that paddle". To any gamer, this is intuitive. I figured I could extend on this. Not only will the paddle own the ball, but the ball will extend its color to nearly anything it touches. When it breaks a brick, the brick turns into a ghost form of its previous self, except with the ball/paddle's color. When it slams into one of the walls, the wall temporarily inherits its color, and it slowly fades off back to the previous color (of white). The invulnerable bricks have the same behaviour as the wall.

Thinking about it, this almost looks as if the players are painting the game world as they're playing. Perhaps the balls could even paint the background as they move around.

I'll post some screenshots sometime soon, once I'm finished messing around with things.