Modified 2005-02-07 09:01

Arkanoid

The Arkanoid game, called "Arkanoid", is a fairly ordinary Arkanoid-style game. Screenshots from version 0.9.1 are seen below (they are from the SDL port, but it looks identical on the REX):

The older 0.4 version looked like like below.

The game features the following:

Playable :-)
Up to 99 levels loaded from a file, the game is supplied with 20 levels. The level format is ASCII-based and simple to understand and use.
Specials:
- Multi-ball. At most 2 balls.
- Extra life.
- Destroyer-ball. The ball does not bounce off one-hit blocks, instead just passes through them.
- Long and short paddle. Obvious.
- Sticky paddle. The ball sticks to the paddle when it is hit.
- Floor. A floor appears at the bottom of the screen causing the ball to bounce at it for three times.
Some blocks require several hits - Some blocks require a LOT of hits :-).
The game can be controlled both by the buttons (up/down/select) or by use of the stylus. Stylus operation does not wear on the buttons (they look very fragile!).

The game can also be built with libSDL (see www.libsdl.org) on UNIX (and probably on other systems). This makes development a lot easier.

Thanks to Otavio Guzzi for the icon used for Arkanoid!

Current development

The changes from 0.9 to 0.9.1 are:

Changed the name of the level-file to Zarkanoid.txt instead.
Maximum number of lives is now 5 (and default is 4)
Runs in the emulator at least :-), applied some nasty tricks to have it compile correctly with zcc

0.9.1 apparently works on the real hardware, as reported on the REX rumor central.

Help

If anyone want's to help with the Arkanoid game, feel free to do so. For instance, better looking graphics would be nice (look in the data/-subdirectory for the source pictures). More and nicer levels would also be appreciated!

If you want to help with the coding of Arkanoid, I'd advice you to install libSDL on your computer and compile the game for your host computer (should work on windows as well). This speeds up development a lot since you don't have to download the game to the REX each time. Further, if you want the latest snapshot of the source, just send me an email.