Breakout - just for fun!

[Łukasz997 117]

Here’s a live demo of the once-popular game named Breakout. This is automated - you can’t play it yourself.

 

But... possibly you can meditate while watching the ball(s) moves?

 

At the end of the file, in onInit(), there are parameters you can set:

- board length (I don’t recommend changing the width)

- maximum number of balls (hitting gold and orchid bricks releases more balls)

- brick size

- three parameters for the paddle AI

Game looks funny when you set border = 1...

But Pre-defined parameters woks well.

 

HTML displaying the game field is - let's say - RLE compressed (empty rows) and uses cache per row. It's really fast!

On a lightly loaded HC3 with a 40×40 board, it can generate up to 80 frames per second (each "tick" game image is completely rebuilt!). With a smaller board, even more. The speed is adjustable from 10-140 FPS by buttons. Further optimisations is possible - as simple as separate image refresh from overall game speed.

Efforts to make paddle “AI” very smart didn’t fully succeed. Algorithm predicts the ball’s trajectory and avoids unnecessary movement - that part works. It's is based on predicting of a triangular wave, with a deliberate error added to simulate human-like behaviour. There’s also a rule to prioritize saving more balls - for example, if three balls are in a tight group and one ball is flying separately, the paddle should sacrifice the single ball and save the three. This is based on evaluating a “penalty” associated with saving each ball. It doesn’t always work; I don’t know why - that’s a task for more skilled.

It’s quite possible for the game of this kind  to fall into stasis - 1-2 blocks remains and can’t be hit. There’s an anti-stall mechanism that perturbs the reflection angle after a given stall time, but it’s not perfect either.

 

Making games, even so simple, seems not to be simple...

This QA is meant to be seen, smiled at - and deleted. Enjoy!

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Edited August 20, 2025 by Łukasz997