This week began a new task: building the classic game Arkanoid. Following the lead of our lecturer the group wrote down the necessary classes and functions needed for the game, dividing the classes in separate files. SDL (Simple DirectMedia Library) was selected as graphical library for this project.
Arkanoid was developed by Taito in 1986, and was based on the game Breakout from Atari, inc. and released 1976. Breakout was built by Steve Wozniak (Co-founder of Apple, and inventor and designer of the Apple computer, also known as the Apple-1) and Steve Jobs (Co-founder of Apple, later CEO of Apple). Breakout was inspired by Pong and had a player try to keep a ball from leaving the screen Pong style, but instead of a second player it featured colored bricks on the other side, with the goal being to break them all without running out of lives.
The project was not finished this week, but rather we constructed the skeleton for it. Files were created for drawing the game and taking control input from mouse and keyboard, and tied them to a gamestate class. The gamestate class is intended to change the state of the game, allowing such things as a menu, hi-score screen, options, game window, etc.
With all this existing we will only need to add the paddle, ball and blocks, which is easily made into a part of the rest of the by the already existing draw function. The controls for the paddle will just have to be added into the existing classes for using mouse and keyboard, and most other functions will likely be part of the objects individual classes.
Hopefully we will have Arkanoid sorted and playable by next week, and I look forward to see how it will play. I have learned a lot this week and improved my knowledge of classes and states. Over all a good week.
/Stefan
stefan Ekdahl 