This document serves as a record of my and my teammates contributions to the completion of the Atari 2600 game BreakBack.

The group consisted of myself, Patrick Jarrett, and Michael Boyce. We formed rather quickly and decided on ad-hoc collaboration since we are all seasoned coders. The game concept was decided on as quickly as possible (as soon as we formed) so that we would not waste any time with implementing it. The group met regularly from 9PM to 11PM on weeknights due to Patrick's work obligations.

The original design was proposed by me and we all agreed to the specifics of the multiplayer aspects. Patrick was unable to come to the first meeting due to illness, so Mike and I began tinkering with Batari to produce the excessively simple demo that would be presented the next day in class. At subsequent meetings, a laptop was shared for coding purposes while a second laptop was used to look up the details of the next step of implementation. I believe I became the unofficial project leader since I pitched the original game idea. Coding was split rather equally, with Mike and me setting up the original player movement and game board, Patrick and I coding the rest of the logic in tandem, and Mike coding the level layouts.

In the end, we were unable to meet one requirement, that being the victory condition for clearing all of the blocks on your side of the field. This was simply because of lack of robustness in querying the playfield blocks and collision detection -- we were unable to correctly count the remaining blocks with the added complexity of respawning blocks. Solutions would have required changing the game design (such as causing the other player to lose a life when you clear your board, and then respawning the whole board), so they were not implemented, and the game was left as is.

BreakBack can be found on Patrick's website.