DHTML Arkanoid
About Arkanoid
} related photos
Arkanoid was one of the first "Breakout"-style games, to the best of my knowledge. It was very popular in the 1980s, and I remember playing it when I was younger. The arcade game was pretty hard to play too, because you had to use a paddle to control the .. paddle.. or maybe it was just because I was around 6 years old at the time.
Some time in 1988 my family got an 8-MHz 8088 PC, and I got a copy of "Arkanoid: Revenge Of DOH" on a 5 1/4" floppy from a friend.. ah, the good old says of casual floppy-based file sharing. Anyways, needless to say I logged my fair share of time playing that game. It had all the features I remembered from the arcade game, and also included a level editor.
Revenge of DHTML
Many late nights and coffee went into the development of DHTML Arkanoid. Forget formal education - this was a double-header in Object-Oriented Javascript, DOM procedures, and cross-browser compatibility.
Oh and patience, lots of patience. 100+ hours (and no degree, diploma or certificate) later, over 128 KB of code had been hacked together to make this thing work - but the taste of success is that of completion, rather than reward.
Recreating the original
The goal was to effectively reproduce the gameplay and rules of the original (based on "Arkanoid: Revenge of DOH".) All of the original power-ups, brick types and the levels (minus the "bosses") are there; if you make the top ten high scores, you can leave your name along with your ranking.
..With a few differences
The PC version for DOS had a level editor which I remembered enjoying, so I tried to make something similar that would allow for user-submitted levels.
The small animated "creatures" that appear from vents at the top of each level were omitted, mostly for performance reasons.
Known issues
- Risk of crash (Flash/ActiveX) over time if SFX enabled
- Occasional "undeclared/undefined" Javascript errors
- Laser fire "misses" on right side
- Left field margin slightly off
- Cross-platform compatibility (eg. Mac/Linux, tested very little)
Basic gameplay
Click to launch the ball, then keep it alive by bouncing it back at the bricks. Destroy bricks for points and power-ups. To pass the level, you must eliminate all "destroyable" bricks.
Custom levels can be created using the editor, or played using the viewer. These are separate from the "main" game, so highscores do not apply.
Brick types
Arkanoid has various types of bricks which make up the levels; each brick has an associated hit count and point value. These have been recreated from the original game as closely as possible. Some bricks have special behaviors associated with them (for example, the "not destroyable" condition - where the brick does not need to be destroyed in order to finish the level.) These behaviors are listed in the "special notes" section of the description.
Game controls
Mouse: Paddle/game navigation control (Left-click for using some power-ups)
Space bar: Game pause/resume shortcut (Applicable only when playing a game)
The primary game controls are icons located at the top left. They allow you to switch between arcade game, level browse and edit modes. Additionally, there are icons for showing the highscores list and a help page.