Breakout Video Game

Description

The task is to create a game similar to Breakout, an arcade game developed and published by Atari. Here are my task instructions:

• Your game should have a single screen with 8 rows of bricks, a paddle, and a ball.
• If the ball touches the bottom of the screen, you lose a ‘life’.
• After 5 lives, the game is over.
• Every time the ball touches a brick, the brick disappears and the score increases.
• The ball bounces off the paddle, the bricks, and the top, left and right edges of the screen.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Game-Instructions
• Features
• Dev-Progress
• Problems
• TODO

Installation

I wrote the game in Java (jre-8u291) using JetBrains' Intellij IDEA and jbr-11 for SDK. (I have yet to learn how to build an executable.)

Game-Instructions

• Press spacebar to launch the ball
• Use keys A and D to move the paddle left and right
• Break the bricks with the ball
• Don't let the ball fall into the abyss!

Features

• Game Menu (Play, How To, Quit)
• Brick breaker mechanics
• Bricks (They have colors!)
• Ball
• Paddle
• Lives
• Score

Dev-Progress

Please find my progress from my personal repo. I created my own repo because I wanted friends to ask me questions about the code. Out of five people that I asked, only one ended up asking questions :'c

Problems

• I have never used C++ for game development before. When doing minor research, I came about a header file that was specific to the Windows OS. Since I have a MacBook Pro, it became a major problem. I have some newbie experience in game dev, but they were written in either Java or C# with the help of Unity, so I never really had to deal with OS specificity. If I really wanted to code this in C++ with the use of the Windows header file, I need to code it in a Windows computer (VM or bootcamp my MacBook) -- though that would mean that only Windows users can work on the code. I am sure there are other alternatives for the windows header out there. I could use Qt, OpenGL, Direct2D, etc.

  • I also wanted to ask my friends to test the game for me, but I have no clue what kind of computer they own, so I ended up using C# with Unity because it is cross-platform. I’ll maybe push it to the Play and App stores for phones
    • Turns out that using game engines isn’t allowed for this project, so I ended up using Java. I learned this a few days before the deadline.

• The IDE offers code clean up feature

• • At first, I thought this was a great idea. It ended up being a culprit. In Handler.java, it suggested changing two for-loops into range-based loops. I thought it wouldn't be a problem. It somehow ended up messing the game objects -- the bricks would still be present underneath/over the game over screen, which resulted into a major error.

TODO

• Clean up GameMenu.java -- it is a mess!
  • I've tried creating a class member for each game object (i.e., ball, paddle, brick), but it gave me errors
• The ball sometimes gets stuck inside the paddle
• The ball direction changes after pressing the spacebar after the ball launches
  • the spacebar should only work when the ball is at its starting point
  • The ball's starting point isn't dynamic -- it only takes in paddle's current x,y coordinates and doesn't change whenever the paddle changes position
• The ball only moves in a slant direction