Brickout

About the game

Brickout is the old paddle-and-ball idea with a few modern touches. You bounce a ball off a paddle at the bottom to break rows of coloured bricks, and you lose a life if the ball gets past you.

Some bricks carry a power-up that falls when they break. Catch it to widen the paddle, split the ball into several, make the ball stick to the paddle so you can aim, fire lasers and more. Hitting bricks without letting the ball touch the paddle builds a combo multiplier, and the score at the top shows it.

There are five levels with different brick layouts. When you clear the last one the levels start again with a faster ball. The game is drawn from simple shapes, with synthesised sound, and keeps your best score in the browser.

Playing it here

Click Play and the game opens on its title screen. Press Play there to start. The sound can be turned off with the speaker icon in the corner, and the game also has a fullscreen button.

Controls

Mouse or Arrows / WASD to move the paddle, Space or click to launch the ball. Touch: drag.

A few things worth knowing

Aim with the edges. Hitting the ball with the side of the paddle changes its angle, which is how you reach the last bricks in a corner.

Chase the combo. The multiplier resets when the ball touches the paddle, so plan long runs of bricks.

FAQ

Does it work on a phone? Yes, drag your finger to move the paddle.

Credits and licence

Brickout is one of the games in LittleJS Arcade by Frank Force, and it runs on his LittleJS engine. Both are released under the MIT licence; the licence text is linked from this page. The collection's repository includes notes for AI coding assistants, so the code was written at least in part with AI help. The graphics are drawn by the code and the sounds are synthesised, so the game loads no image or audio files. The source code is on GitHub.