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I have to say I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this project. Not to say I expected to dislike it, but the idea of programming for Atari wasn’t something I was specifically excited for. And yet the work and project was quite satisfying.

Our group did not follow the set roles, instead we all collaborated on the aspects of the game. I was involved mostly in the coding though I have to give Max credits as the leader in that aspect.

We knew from the beginning that we wanted to develop a multiplayer game and after tossing a few ideas around we decided on a competitive breakout game. Our initial idea was to have it swap tiles 1 for 1 but we decided that could lead to long drawn out games beyond what would be fun. So we brought up the competitive play to a 1 for 3 tile swap.

As we developed the game we ran into a few design snags, the largest of which was to find a win condition. For normal breakout it can be done through a simple counter based on the number of tiles, but with our implementation of competition between players the problems grew a bit more complicated. We initially planned to simply add to the counter whenever a new block was spawned but it was found that the system might spawn a block that was already there and thus incorrectly increase the count.

The solution we tried to implement was to, on collision with the third block, move that player’s bullet to the other side to see if their block exists or not. If it doesn’t exist, spawn it and increase their count accordingly, then return the bullet to the player’s side and resume the game play. This works sporadically, for whatever reason the shift is not perfect and so we’ve found that the game does not end perfectly. It will sometimes end correctly, but other times will end a few blocks short. We haven’t figured out how to correct these errors, which are fairly minor in terms of the overall game play. It does however identify the correct winner as far as our play testing has shown.

breakback.zip