Spooky Bricks: The Beginning!

Very excited to announce a new project:

Spooky Bricks!

Spooky Bricks is a breakout-inspired, Halloween-themed game planned to be released just before Halloween.

Art is by a new member to Team Bagel whose alias is still TBD.

This is very early stuff here - literally about 2 hours worth of work - but we are both excited where this may go.

What's our take here...

Like I said, and obvious from the game below, it is Breakout inspired. I have personally found that it works well to start with a simple, well-known concept. Especially when working in a team as it instantly sets a clear an unified goal or vision.

Of course we don't want to simply re-create Breakout here and will be adding unique features or mechanics as we go and pulling from other inspirations to see what we can incorporate into the game. We are both creative people so I have full confidence this won't end up as just a Breakout clone. Some big things I wanted to avoid is spending more time discussing the game than working on it, scoping issues, and any potential of scrapping everything having to start over.

Being Halloween themed there is a lot of different things to pull from and incorporate into the game, which should be pretty fun to work with.

So our main take here is to have fun with it. Even below you can already see some slight animations that are kind of paving the way for things down the road.

What we got so far...

Of course this is very early going - kind of prototyping or playing around here. A lot of people would probably say "you can't share stuff at this stage - people will think the quality will represent the final product!"

But I say sharing is caring! Think whatever you want, ha.

Right now we are thinking releasing on Steam and on mobile so we tested out some different controls.

Desktop

Simply hover here to control paddle. Click to release ball when attached to paddle.

Oh, and avoid those witches! No restart programmed in if they kill you so will have to refresh the page right now.

Mobile

This is a bit more tricky to use right now - one for being in a web browser instead of an app - but two just because I haven't spent any time on fixing the quirks here. So if you are on mobile:

• Hold phone in landscape
• Tap the game and you should receive a pop up asking access to accelerometer, or "Motion and Orientation"
• Hit Approve or Okay
• Now the paddle should be controlled by tilting
• Act like you are driving a car - the tilt is controlled in that direction
• If you lose the paddle way of the screen sometimes it is easiest just to refresh

Of course this should get more user friendly as we go but I think it is pretty fun as-is once you figure it out. I like the fact the paddle can go way off the screen as you can't just slam your phone left or right if the ball is going to that corner.

What's Next?

We will see! We are kind of "riffin" right now. Brainstorming and working at the same time!

If you have any comments you know how to get ahold of me!