Brick Breaker

Breakout came out in 1976, designed by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs for Atari. The mechanic is so simple a child can describe it in one sentence: a ball bounces around the screen, you move a paddle to keep it from falling, and every brick it touches disappears. Forty-nine years later, that exact loop still works. Every casual gamer has spent at least one bored afternoon with some version of it.

Our version is the original mechanic with the polish that decades of mobile-game iteration have added. Five rows of colored bricks at the top of the screen. A paddle at the bottom. A ball that bounces realistically based on where it hits the paddle — strike the centre and it goes straight up, strike the edge and it angles sharply sideways. That paddle-angle physics is the secret weapon of Breakout strategy: you can steer the ball by where you let it land.

How to actually win. Don't passively let the ball bounce around. Aim every paddle hit. Watch the bricks you've already broken to find narrow gaps the ball could tunnel through into the empty space above the wall — once it gets up there, it bounces along the top destroying bricks rapidly while you barely have to do anything. Setting up that tunnel is the difference between a level that takes you five minutes and one that takes thirty seconds.

Power-ups appear randomly when you break a brick: a green W widens your paddle, a blue S slows the ball down, a red + gives you an extra life. Catch them with your paddle. The wider-paddle and slow-ball power-ups stack, so chaining them in a tough level can carry you through.

Build notes. The ball-paddle bounce uses a simple position-to-angle mapping — the ball's horizontal position relative to the paddle centre determines the bounce angle, scaled by 60 degrees max. That single trick is what makes the game feel skill-based rather than purely random. The brick collisions use AABB-circle intersection with a dominant-axis check to decide whether to bounce horizontally or vertically — works correctly even when the ball hits a brick corner. Each level rebuilds the brick wall with a different pattern; the higher you go, the more gaps and tougher bricks you face.