It's one of those break out games! In this game the player uses the mouse to place blocks move the paddle to bounce the balls around the screen.

Press X to insert coin

Would love to know people's thoughts and suggestions for improvement :)

More information
StatusReleased
PlatformsHTML5
Rating
Rated 4.3 out of 5 stars
(13 total ratings)
AuthorCraig Tinney
GenreAction
Made withPICO-8
TagsArcade, Breakout, PICO-8

Comments

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Tronche2Cake2 years ago

Simple and a lot of fun to play, I like it.

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PhilipL🌾5 years ago

Really fun and well designed breakout type game. It is just breakout with a really good gameplay loop and repeatability. Very good choice of blocks. They all work together in interesting ways.

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Craig Tinney5 years ago

Thank you Philip!

Incidentally, I also appreciate your thoughts on Pico Pirates, but it seems when I switched the comments from a discussion forums to comments in light of your feedback, I lost your comment :(

PP certainly does have a number of issues around gameplay and particularly balancing and this is something I'm looking to discuss in an upcoming postmortem. Thank you for your feedback and kind words :)

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PhilipL🌾5 years ago (2 edits)

Regarding the "pico pirates" comment: The game was very technically impressive (no idea how pico8 works tho), the gameplay could be improved a bit and the battles against the ships were extremely hard. Was wondering how you made the 3d effects on the trees. They were very impressive, was wondering what method you were using.

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Craig Tinney5 years ago

I actually got the idea for the trees from one of my favourite games, Duck Duck On The Loose https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.lexaloffle.com/...


Essentially, layer a stack of circles (of varying colours) offset with a Z value. Shift each circle in the direction from the camera to the screen space position of each circle, using the Z value as the mmagnitude  of the vector.

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PhilipL🌾5 years ago (1 edit)

Okay thanks, ive hard of simmilar methods before. Was wondering if it was another one. Thank you anyways.

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treehann5 years ago

Hey I enjoyed this game a lot!  I found it from searching the "breakout" tag (one I have also populated).  Focusing on controlling two places at once felt like a unique modifier for breakout and the game looks great.  I got a score of 7160 on my last playthrough.

My only suggestions are these:

  • Consider another way to destroy solid blocks other than bombs.  If the grid either fills up with solids by pure chance OR the only living balls get stuck (something that happened to me eventually in every play), the player is stuck.  I would suggest giving each solid brick a very large "health" value that is depleted with every ball hit, to get rid of the stuck ball issue.
  • Allow the player to change the horizontal velocity of the ball somehow, either by hitting a certain part of the paddle, or using the paddle velocity to change the ball velocity.  This would give the player more control over the bottom part of the game.

Anyway, I had fun and would play again :)

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gdcvdqpl6 years ago

I managed to get the ball stuck between solid blocks. It's a shame there is nothing to do left in this situation. Very nice game tho, extremely enjoyable !

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quasiotter6 years ago

this is so stressful! i love it!

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