The 20 Game Challenge #2: Breakout

For game #2 in The 20 Games Challenge I made a Breakout clone. I chose Breakout to play around with single screen games.

Assets

Despite the high complexity of the assets (big sarcasm here...) I decided to make all the assets myself. 

Pain points

Overall this project went pretty smoothly. There were a couple of difficulties with the ball physics but overall everything slotted into place nicely. I think overall this was a simpler project than game #1, and the experience from the first project carried over nicely.

Proud moments

I was very happy with how the game looked in the end. In my opinion, it ended up pretty similar to the original arcade machine. It was pretty difficult to find decent references, as most searches returned results for the Atari 2600 version or Googles breakout easter egg.

Favorite discovery

State machines. Towards the end I rewrote most of the game loop to use a state machine for the state of the game. Overall this simplified the flow of the game greatly, both in code and in my mind. Definitely a pattern that I will be using again going forward!

Overall the project only took a few hours one afternoon to put together. Definitely went a lot faster than I expected, although there are a few minor issues that I know about that are not fixed at the time of writing.