Bricks 'n Balls
A downloadable game
About
Bricks 'n balls is a breakout clone for Commodore 64. It can be played on real hardware or in an emulator. On each level, your goal is to remove all the bricks from the playfield (except for unbreakable ones). Game can be controlled with joystick, paddle, or 1351 mouse in port 2. If using paddles, make sure that potentiometers are good, if not, clean them. When joystick is selected, keys C,V and M also work for game controll.
When you activate cheat mode, Restore is your friend. Hint for cheat mode activation is somewhere on hiscore screen (works in prereview too).
Make sure to check levels 10, 30 and 50 for some nice music tributes.
Story
Your trusty flash drive that holds all of your favorite retro games has gone bad. You played them so much that memory cells became weak. You managed to refresh some of them, but in the process some cells became unerasable. After consulting people on various demo parties you managed to create C64 code that can recover the rest of cells via quantum entaglement with C64 RAM, using the C64 as a kind of magnifying glass into flash memory.
Interestingly, it turned out that only graphics from old games and some of your own projects is what resisted erasing.
All you need to do now is to bump all bad memory cells to erase their content. You can bump them with energy balls, but since their number is limited, you'll need to reuse them over and over. For that purpose, you implemented reflecting bat that can relaunch energy balls back to unerased memory cells. But you MUST NOT miss the ball, or you'll lose it.
Credits for the game
Code
- Žarko Živanov
- TRSE Libraries by Leuat
- Spindle by LFT
Audio
- NecroPolo
Graphics
- Žarko Živanov
- Logo font by TMR
- End picture by Alias Medron
Level design
- Žarko Živanov
- David Youd
Testing
- Žarko Živanov
- David Youd
- Joeri-C64
- Marko Šolajić
- Vladimir Dumitrašković
THX Intro Credits
- Code: Aktar/Avatar
- THX Sound Effects: NecroPolo/Avatar
- Graphics: Clayboy/Invaders
Additional credits for the game preview
- Myztix SID music by dEViLOCk
- SFX Anywhere by 4mat
Download
Development log
- A bug in ball algotithm37 days ago
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Very nice Breakout game, similar to Arkanoid with beautiful graphics & sound. Our German-language review can be found at 00:34:31. English subtitles are also available. Subscription to our YouTube and Twitch channel is welcome. 🙂
Hi, thank you for featuring my game!
A good Breakout game with added some own ideas. I should try it with a mouse or paddle, it might be easier. I added it to my video along with other games released in February.
Thanks for including my game into your February video! And yes, playing with mouse or paddles is much more natural, at least for me.
Good Breakout variant with great music and nice graphics. Only Two-Player-support I miss a little bit (T.R.A.Z. is my favorite Breakout-clone on the C64 because of this), but nevertheless, "Bricks 'n Balls" is a good game.
Thank you for trying it out! Yes, I know it would be more fun with 2 players. That would complicate a bit detecting both joystick/paddles/mouses and keyboard too. I did spend some time trying to figure out how would that work, read some codebase64 articles, but decided in the end not to put it in. If I get more knowledge about the subject, maybe some update later, who knows...
Thanks for answering. Okay i understand. Maybe in your next project? Especially 2-player-simultan games, have their own special appeal, or are always very good party-games, when friends are around. Another possibility would be a CPU-player, that could, either support the human player to play as a team, or play against the human player. I could image also something like this, in a Breakout game, it could be fun. Best regards.
Played it with paddles, and love it!! I wish you would make a power-up that is like the shooting gun from Arkanoid
Hi, thanks for playing the game! I did contemplate about bullet power-up, but did not implement it in the end (several people told me that the game would become too easy). Maybe if I decide to make updated version, but for now I am going to focus on other (mainly non-programming) retro things, like fixing some of my old computers...
Sounds good. How many levels does the game have?
100 levels with game characters, and 10 additional with computer badges (Commodore sign, ZX sign etc), so 110 in total.
A very decent breakout game. Although it is not arkanoid (as there are no aliens implemented in the game), it is good fun. Good music also.
Thank you, means a lot from you!
I thought I should ask, is this game a multiload?
Sort-of... I ran out of memory to include end picture in the (until then single-load) game, so when player finishes all, end picture is loaded over some of the game data, and after the picture is displayed, game data is loaded back.
Nice Breakout clone! Played it with the mouse and it worked great.
Thank you for the video, and for your kind comment, I have seen it a few days back. Release should have been a few days back too, but real life intervened...