Brick breaker

It's Just Another Game

Brick breaker is a classic game that his been created many times by many programmers over the years. This is just my quick and dirty attempt to replicate it. No fancy bells and whistles, just plain old simple Brick Breaker.

Game Play

It is really simple use the arrows to move the paddle left and right at the bottom of the screen. Do not let the ball fall below the paddle or you loose a life. You only have 3 lives to destroy every brick in the level.

Bricks

It's not hard hit a brick with the ball to destroy it. If the brick has a higher number on it then it means you need to hit it more to destroy it.

Paddle

When the ball hits the paddle it goes up. Well ish...

If you hit the ball with the left side of the paddle then it will go to the left. If you hit it with the right side of the paddle it will go to the right. This gives you some ability to aim the ball.

Too Lazy to Play? Me too!

If you don't feel like actually moving the paddle about with your hands that's okay I didn't feel like doing that either. If press the "c" key then you will activate cheat mode and the paddle will move itself under the ball.

Aim Point

The paddle will aim for a particular brick. The current mode is to aim for the brick with the highest number of hits required to destroy it. If there is more than one then it will priorities based on position on the screen. Starting from the top row the AI will prefer bricks from left to right then go down the rows. If the brick is hit and no longer has the highest value it will move on to another brick.

AI Limits

There are a few limits placed on the AI. It can only move the paddle at the same speed as a human, just to make it fair. When the aim point of the ball moves then the paddle will smoothly transition from it's current position to it's goal position using a PID loop. In this case only the proportional term is used.

Also it can't perfectly aim for for the desired brick. Some Perlin noise is added to the position of the paddle to make it wobble around the goal position. This is to make it slightly more human. If the Perlin noise moves the paddle so that the ball will no longer hit the paddle then it is constrained.

See Also - Games