Breakout

A recreation of a classic game

Breakout was one of the games which laid the foundations for my interest in video games. Therefore, this homework was an absolute blast for me. Given that I have worked for more than a week for the game and I’m pretty happy with the finished product and if I had 6–8 weeks to work on it, I would have done more things and fixed some bugs. Below is the trailer of the game.

Few Screenshots from the game.

Early draft of the game and how the home screen would look like if created</div> Ideally, I would’ve liked a start screen, which allowed the user to pick the language they want and allow them to start the game, I think this is a more interactive option and certainly more appealing for the user. Additionally an option to pause the game would also be good, the current build is literally akin to playing the game in an arcade game parlour.

Early draft of the game and how the home screen would look like if created

Ideally, I would’ve liked a start screen, which allowed the user to pick the language they want and allow them to start the game, I think this is a more interactive option and certainly more appealing for the user. Additionally an option to pause the game would also be good, the current build is literally akin to playing the game in an arcade game parlour.

I certainly would like to improve the aesthetics of the game, adding blocks in between the bricks would be good, this would make the collisions with the ball a bit more unpredictable, which brings me to the point of using randomized velocities, which would be influenced by an angle, according to the position the ball collides at. This would also help making the forthcoming levels harder. We don’t want the game to be too easy, so certain special bricks could be created, which could give the ball a special power, this could be becoming a fireball, which makes the bricks destroyed at one hit, rather than two hits. This power would remain for a given amount of time and the ball would to back to its normal state after that. Similar thing could be implemented for a paddle. I would also clean up the code and test the game. Game testing is very crucial to building a really good game, ofcourse one can’t find all the bugs, but finding enough helps to make the user experience smooth and also allows to spread the good word. The below is a link to the public git repo which contains the build and the documentation.

Below is the trailer of the game.

To conclude, this was an excellent experience for me and I learnt a lot in my game dev journey with SDL and C++.