A Simple Breakout Clone

I think Breakout (or Arkanoid if you want) is the easiest game to make. That's why I chose it to test my new sprite engine for Direct3D 8. You can download the game at the bottom of this page. Currently it has the following features:

• 20 levels (supports up to 99)
• Multiple block types
• Cool eye candy when you break blocks

It also has the following problems and bugs:

• Sometimes the message box for level begin doesn't show up
• There are some collision anomalies (but not too serious)
• Paddle is just too small
• There are some issues with alpha blending if your card doesn't support the alpha channel in the back buffer.

I probably won't ever fix those things or add to this, but anybody else can I geuss. The file levels.dat can be modified in any text editor and you can create new levels. Just look at existing levels and you'll get the idea.

To run, you'll need the DirectX 8.0 or higher run times installed on your Windows 98+ machine (now I'd like to say something here: Windows 2000 kicks ass and anyone who says that it won't run DirectX games is wrong! Win2k requires special forms of the DLLs for DirectX but it works perfectly. Most games are developed on NT machines so it is just fine!). I'd also say having a decent video card is good and you'll need to support a 32bit color mode (at 640x480) or it just won't work. The game doesn't use hardware vertex processing, so you don't need any of that to be supported.

Download (with executable and source)