Bricktron

After AI Refactoring

Legacy Version

Attract Mode (In-Game Demo)

After a few seconds of inactivity on the intro screen (or when launched with --demo), the game plays itself: the paddle auto-tracks the ball and grabs falling power-ups.

Bricktron attract mode demo: the paddle plays itself and catches power-ups

Screenshots

Bricktron intro screen with pixel-art title

Bricktron gameplay with colorful tile grid and space background

Bricktron game over screen with high score table

Bricktron particle explosion effects during gameplay

A polished C++ implementation of the classic brick-breaker arcade game, built with Allegro 5 for graphics, audio, and input handling. The player controls a paddle to deflect a ball into a 10x5 grid of destructible tiles, each with an HP system requiring up to 3 hits to destroy. The game wraps the gameplay in a full retro experience: an animated CRT-styled intro screen, a name input prompt, level progression with hand-designed layouts loaded from files (falling back to randomized grids), five distinct power-ups, retro sound effects, particle effects, and a persistent top-10 high score table.

Features

Retro CRT intro screen: falling pixel-art title bricks, rainbow shimmer, starfield background, bouncing ball, decorative bottom bricks
Name input screen with blinking cursor and CRT scanline overlay
Destructible tile grid: 10x5 layout with per-tile HP system (up to 3 HP), beveled rendering with highlight/shadow edges and visible crack lines as tiles take damage
Custom levels: hand-designed layouts loaded from levels/NN.txt files at runtime, with a fallback to randomized grids once they run out
5 power-ups with 25% drop chance: wider paddle, slow ball, extra life, multiball (spawns extra balls), and fireball (ball plows through tiles) — timed effects shown as on-screen progress bars
Retro sound effects: procedurally generated WAV samples for paddle/wall bounces, tile hits, destruction, power-up pickup, life loss, level clear, and game over (runs silently if audio is unavailable)
Pause: freeze the action with a dimmed overlay (P key)
Particle explosion system: per-tile particles with gravity simulation, color variation, and fade effects
Ball motion trail: fading tail rendered behind the ball for visual polish
Screen shake triggered on tile destruction for impact
Paddle angle control: ball angle changes based on where it strikes the paddle (left third, center, right third)
Persistent high scores: top-10 leaderboard saved to scores.dat in binary format with animated row fade-in
Resizable window with a logical render buffer scaled to the display, plus a stretch-to-fill fullscreen toggle (F)
Attract mode: after inactivity on the intro (or with --demo) the game plays itself — the paddle auto-tracks the ball and collects falling power-ups
Cross-platform: Runs on both Linux and Windows

Technical Details

Language: C++
Graphics/Audio/Input: Allegro 5
Build system: CMake 3.2+
Platforms: Linux, Windows

Download & Play (Linux)

A ready-to-run Flatpak bundle is published on GitHub. No build required — grab the latest release and install:

flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install --user bricktron.flatpak
flatpak run io.github.arturkos.Bricktron

Build Instructions

Requirements: CMake (3.2+), Allegro 5

git clone https://github.com/ArturKos/bricktron.git
cd bricktron
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

Check out the project on GitHub: Bricktron on GitHub

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