Show HN: Breakout with a roguelite/vampire survivor twist

Both valid points. I colored the coins for two reasons : they are pretty and the perk "coins stain bricks" means that if a red coin hits a blue brick, that brick becomes blue (which helps with other perks like "picky eater" and "color pierce"). I think there could be a short text that changes once you perform the action, so "click to start", "catch the ball", "catch the coins for score", and "clear all bricks", then it would be gone once you finish the first level.

I rather enjoyed that I got to make the discovery that the particles were coins, moreover, I enjoyed dropping STRAIGHT into the game without having to read anything or press any buttons. Lastly, this worked flawlessly on my iPhone, bravo to the work you did to make that happen!

I had this same thought; maybe just CSS to make them glow / glint a little? Or make the edges golden? I agree there could be a bit of juice on the coins. Or possibly the noise could be a little more clink/coinish.

Yes. Coins should all be gold and spin on edge (so they don't present as just circles). Colored halo or trail can match the origin brick color.

Thanks for the feedback. Fullscreen is offered in the menu when "document.fullscreenEnabled || document.webkitFullscreenEnabled" is true. I've noticed it doesn't show in safari mobile, but you can trigger it by click aA / Hide toolbars. I'll look at the pointer lock, i could easily unlock it once you pause the game with a click, so it wouldn't be too intrusive. For the score, i'm thinking to put the score multiplier there instead, i'll experiment a bit. There's a life counter, in the sense that you start with 0 extra lives, but if you pick the extra life perk, you'll see 1 heart per life next to your score. The game being 100Kb, you can probably guess I'll pass the electron option, but Tauri could be considered. First, I'll just make the web app offline capable. Also, I'm pretty sure that "save page as / Web page, complete" would work on desktop and give you a usable app (YMMV). I personally dislike Steam (mandatory updates, slow UI, DRM, monopoly, online requirement), and never buy any game there, so it's not a priority to publish there for me, but I might put it there once I have enough interest and price if 4 euros. I'd rather have a good app on the web first, and deal with the various store's rules and painful UIs later, I'm doing this for fun after all.

I'm another vote for hiding the cursor. It's pretty distracting, especially early on in a level when there's still a lot of low-level bricks.

Pointer lock is now in the options, it also hides the cursor, let me know your thoughts. Fullscreen mode should be toggled with the F key, or in the menu.

Also need (great if): spacebar launches ball, L/R arrows moves bar.

Some of the perks seem to be downgrades or maybe they require synergy.

Compound interest will tank you combo… unless you use magnetism (necessary) and viscosity (very helpful), at which point you get exponential bonus going.

The perk that gives you more bonus the more bounces your ball does seems like it could be good, but it resets your bonus when you hit the ball with your paddle, so actually it is streak destroying. But maybe there’s some hidden combo with another perk?

Thanks, yeah i need to work on a deeper level of help for the curious players that really want to understand what's going on, without adding a wiki ^^

Both good points, the message now says "Press and hold here to play" and "Slower ball: slow down the ball". English isn't my native language.

Thank you. I didn't try chrome on android much so I'll see how that goes. I'm going to guess that clicking the upgrade buttons was enough for chrome to allow me to play sounds, but clicking a canvas wasn't. Coins were initially just glowing colored circles but nobody understood they were coins, i went a bit too much to the other side, i'll find the right look eventually :)

Pointer lock is now a thing, you can turn it on in the menu.

Thanks for the feedback. I recommend turning on full screen in the menu, until I figure out how to add mouse lock .

Your coins look like coins, i'm a bit jealous and will do the same :) So you're going for a longer play style, with many levels, and a character build where you have a very strong ship at the end ? I think trying to tell stories around such a simple mechanic with nicely designed levels and background is a great idea ! If you release out of steam at some point, I'd love to try it. I'm allergic to that platform and its constant updates, my gaming pc does not connect to the internet and will stay on windows 10 forever.

I figured this can be used to cheat a bit. The paddle warps to the finger instantly on touch. You can use the pause to catch all coins

Right, I wasn't really sure about that title either. I didn't play vampire survivor, but I saw footage where the game stops completely as you level up, you get to think and choose an upgrade in peace, and then the frenetic action start again. It inspired me to add this mechanic to the game, instead of the quick thinking required in traditional breakout, so that's why i mentioned it. I don't think I can change the title here, but if a mod could remove the vampire survivor mention, it would make the title more accurate.

Oh, that could be really cool, like a last level that starts scrolling down and go faster and faster until you die. But that's for a future major version of the game.

Thanks. I guess one perk i could add is "3 random perks" where you have to figure out what you got haha. The flashing lines you see are signaling that you missed the bricks and didn't hit any. That will reset your combo. If you manage to never miss in a level, you'll get and extra upgrade and choice. If you miss less than 3 times, you'll just get an extra choice.

Merci for the feedback.

A/ I had a current level display before, but now the menu is in its place. I guess once you pass level 1 i could display your current level instead of "menu" at the top right. I also want to show the score and multiplier, i'll have to do hard choices. B/ Yes, letting users pick the next level is a great perk, it's a bit of a code change but not that hard, i added it to the possible new perks list. C/ This perk already exists (menu/unlocks/+1 level) but you need to score a bit to get it.

I've played a lot of nova drift where the is a lot of complexity to the upgrades system in-run. In previous versions of breakout 71 you would permanently unlock perks level by level but that was a lot of code and not contributing much to the fun, so I got rid of it and you for example just unlock all 3 levels of "extra level" at total score 13000 (all run scores summed).

I did restrict some perks about ball to ball interactions (ball_repulse_ball, ball_attract_ball to having first picked the multiball perk) because otherwise they'd do absolutely nothing.

The misses, coin catch % and level clearing speeds are already tied to an in-game behavior of having more options and being able to upgrade more than once after a level, so I don't know if I'd also add another thing that depends on it. Keyboard users (where it's really hard to not miss 50% of shots) will be mad :)

I never heard of Mario style time unlocks, that sounds like silly fun. You get something for finishing the level in a sepecific amount of seconds, no matter how many minutes?