Breakout—bringing back old-school gaming

You have probably seen many forms of the game Breakout in the past couple of decades, especially during the Atari days. To give you a good idea of what the game is about, here is a brief editorial by Big Fish Games about the history of Breakout: http://www.bigfishgames.com/blog/the-history-of-breakout/.

On the game screen, there are several columns and rows of bricks placed near the top of the screen. A ball travels across the screen, bouncing off the top and side walls of the screen. When a brick is hit, the ball bounces away and the brick is destroyed. The player loses the round when the ball touches the bottom of the screen. To prevent this from happening, the player has a movable paddle to bounce the ball upward, keeping it in play.

We're going to be creating a clone using touch events and the accelerometer for paddle movement that will be controlled by the player. We'll be adding some physics to the ball so it can bounce throughout the screen.

In the next chapter, we'll be adding the movement of the game objects, collision detection, score keeping, and win/lose conditions. Right now, we're going to focus on how to set up the game template of Breakout.