Gravout, a new take on the classout “Breakout” game.
I am attempting a control scheme unline any I have seen for the classic breakout game. Rather than a paddle, you can greate a gravitational force which attracts the ball.
I started from the ground up, getting SDL, gravity, bounces, bricks, and the win conditions working in order. Implementing the basic gameplay with gravity and bounces took some time to get right, but was quite straightforward. While I had the cursor speed limit from the beginning, I first allowed it to move anywhere. This turned out to be rather uninteresting as you could just place gravity in the corner and let things happen, so I decided to allow the cursor to only move within the traditional paddle area. After some additional tuning of parameters, the sample game was ready.
Breakout with gravity instead of a paddle. I've seen many variations on the game, but not this one.
The game needs much more content to be interesting for more than a couple minutes, but I believe it achievs my goals. The game is sufficiently challenging and fast paced in order to at least be interesting, and the control scheme works as I had hoped. The only thing I would liked to have done differently in the given time is the end screend. I have not yet added nest's text capabilities to my own template code, so I went with symbols instead. I think they convey the point, but they feel odd.
Build using the make script in the top-level source directory. The executable will be created in build/linux/dist. I have also included pre-build Mac and Linux executables in the build directory.