Interactive demo
BONE-BREAKER
WEB-GAME DEVELOPMENT / 2023–2024
This was a project for a web development course at Linköping University. I created this together with my fellow student and friend Karin Stendahl.
The game is a variant of the classic Breakout game, where the player controls a paddle, and must bounce a ball onto bricks which will then break. The game is won when every brick is broken.
In our version, the player must break all the bones. The player must also avoid any falling broken bones. And instead of a ball, there is an angry-lookin skull bouncing around.
We knew we wanted to make a Breakout game, but we didn't have a particular theme in mind at first. It was during one of our design meetings that we randomly joked about "bone-breaker" being a funny name for the game. And from there, we quickly came up with the idea about the ball being a skull, the bricks being bones, and it taking place in a hellish world.
PADDLE HEALTH
We added a health system to the paddle, due to the difficulty added by the falling broken bones. This was both to give the player a second chance for any mistakes, as well as alleviating the problem of "impossible situations", that is, situations where the skull and a falling bone fall to same place, forcing the player to either lose the skull or get hit by a bone.
We also added a heart block, which drops a healing heart when broken. The heart must then be caught with the paddle to restore one health-point.
MULTIPLE SKULLS
Breaking a certain skull block causes new skulls to spawn.
Periodically having multiple skulls changes the intensity in gamplay, and leads to more variation in playing experience.
It's very hard to keep multiple skulls in play for an extended period of time, as these skulls are easily lost. However, it's only when losing the final skull, that the paddle takes damage.
FUN CHAOS
The skull blocks can sometimes lead to a chain reaction of skulls spawning.
This adds an element of chaotic unpredictability, as these chain reactions can quickly lead to either loss or victory.
Personally, I find these moments to be the highlights when playing the game, as I always look for opportunities to trigger these chain reactions.
CODE DESIGN
Our two main principles regarding the code design was scalability and reusability.
Scalability in the sense that it should be easy to add new things, such as new objects or new game mechanics. And to do this without having to change much of the already existing code. This meant that we encapsulated much of the behavior of the individual game objects to their respective classes.
And reusability in the sense that we don't want to write the same code twice. For the game objects, this meant that much behavior could be inherited from superclasses. For example, the skull block and heart block inherits most of their behavior from the bone class. This can be seen in the class diagram below depicting the inheritance of all the game objects in the game.
SPRITE DESIGN
We envisioned the game's graphics to consist of pixelated sprites, giving the game a charming look and feel, despite the game's fairly edgy theme.
The sprites were created by me, and as a basis I used some sprites from some of my earlier games.
For the hellish background, however, I used generative AI to create. I prompted it to generate a "hellish landscape with lava set in a cave". I then blurred it and altered its hue to make it more suitable as a background, as to make the sprites "pop out" more, and to minimize background cluttering which would only lead to unnecessary cognitive load on the player.
AVAILABLE ON GITHUB
The code is publicly available here on my GitHub.