LÖVE

Very cool indeed. I especially like the idea of a parabolic ball arc in a breakout game, I don't think I've ever seen that before!

The sound effects seem to cutout (or, more accurately, 'not get triggered when they should') - e.g. the sound of the ball hitting the bat seems to occur one time out of two if the ball is bouncing a short distance onto low-hanging bricks and back onto the bat. I suspect you're using a single audio Source object for each sound effect and just doing :play() or something like that? (haven't looked at your code yet). That doesn't always do what you want especially if the previous sound hasn't yet finished. You could try taking a look at creating a simple audio manager using a technique similar to what is used in Mutrix or the audiomanager.lua I used in Biodiversity (both found on this forum)

I made two bonus levels, because I was bored and wanted to play more of this game. Especially the first level I made, was made specifically to use together with the multi-ball bonus.

New version:

1)space bar no longer required to launch ball - Now right click launches instead -
2)3 new levels added - level 2 heart level and levels 9 and 10 contributed by Robin
3) rudimentary Gamepad support added - although, it makes the game much harder since it is moving the paddle at a constant speed - I am thinking of an acceleration method to improve paddle control for a later version.

@Robin - Thanks for the new levels! I am hoping to get 100+ levels in this game at some point... So, I really appreciate contributions!

@stripwax - thanks for the suggestions regarding the audio handling - I did admittedly take the quickest dirtiest approach to Box Breaker's sound handling - it was more of an after-thought really - It is on my list for future improvements - I will take a look at Biodiversity next chance I get! I also have some missing sounds as well as sounds I would like to replace when I get a chance to polish stuff nicely

I have actually played through this game twice now.

Your gamepad controls don't feel very nice. It's basically digital controls; tilting the control stick slightly doesn't make the paddle move slighty, you have to press it over 50%, and then the paddle moves at 100% speed. Not nice. Scale the speed of the paddle with the value from getAxis().

TechnoCat wrote:I have actually played through this game twice now.

Only twice?

JDFight wrote:@Robin - Thanks for the new levels! I am hoping to get 100+ levels in this game at some point... So, I really appreciate contributions!

Then you'd better change the way the maps are defined. Here is my version: each level sits in its own file, I have also contributed the mandatory level file maps/map.11. So now you can ask contributors just for plain text files to create new levels.
BTW, the maxLevel can also be computed based on files in this directory...

Robin wrote:

TechnoCat wrote:I have actually played through this game twice now.

Only twice?

Yes, I agree, using Ammo to destroy the blocks makes the game too easy... I hope people come up with more difficult levels

T-Bone wrote:Your gamepad controls don't feel very nice. It's basically digital controls; tilting the control stick slightly doesn't make the paddle move slighty, you have to press it over 50%, and then the paddle moves at 100% speed. Not nice. Scale the speed of the paddle with the value from getAxis().

I don't have a game pad, so I can't help, but the code is open source, so you can fix it and contribute back.

miko wrote:

Robin wrote:

TechnoCat wrote:I have actually played through this game twice now.

Only twice?

Yes, I agree, using Ammo to destroy the blocks makes the game too easy... I hope people come up with more difficult levels

One possible way of making ammo a bit less game-breaking would be to have it impact the blocks the same way the ball does; right now the ball "removes one energy level per block" (changes its color) while each bullet kills a block, no matter what "level" it is.