Arkanoid

About Arkanoid

Arkanoid is a brick-breaking arcade game. You slide a paddle along the bottom of the playfield and keep a ball in play, knocking out a wall of 120 bricks in ten rows of twelve. Some bricks break on the first hit, others need two or three, and a brick changes shade as it takes damage. Destroy the whole wall to clear the cave; let the ball drop past the paddle and you lose a life.

Each life starts with the ball resting on your paddle. Launch it with Space, W, the up arrow, a click or tap on the board, or the Launch button on phones. Where the ball meets the paddle sets its angle: the centre sends it almost straight up and the tips send it off at up to 60 degrees, so you aim by choosing which part of the paddle to hit with. Steer by holding the arrow keys or A and D, by moving the mouse over the board, or by dragging a finger on it.

Scoring, levels and tips

• You start with three lives; the run ends when the last one is gone.
• Every brick hit scores 10 × (5 − hits the brick has left). The breaking hit is always worth 50; earlier hits on tougher bricks are worth 30 or 40.
• The ball gets 2% faster every time it hits a brick, up to a speed limit. The new ball you get after losing a life starts at the cave's launch speed again.
• Clearing a cave takes you to the next one with your score and lives intact. The caves rotate through three brick patterns, and each cave launches the ball a little faster than the last, up to a limit.
• A destroyed brick has a 15% chance to drop a lettered capsule. Catch it with the paddle for 100 points and its effect: M is multiball (two extra balls), E expands the paddle to 1.4 times its width, L gives you a laser (Space, a click or a tap fires two beams from the paddle), S slows the ball to 60% speed, C makes the ball stick to the paddle until you launch it again, and + is an extra life.
• Expand, laser, slow and catch last until you lose a life or clear the cave.
• The shield bar under the playfield charges as you break bricks and bounce the ball off the side walls. When it is full, a line lights up along the floor and the next ball that would fall bounces back up instead, emptying the bar.
• Your best score is saved in your browser whenever a run ends or you clear a cave.
• Tip: power-ups fall straight down from the brick that dropped them, so you know where to be the moment one appears.
• Tip: because every hit adds speed, a slow power-up is worth more late in a cave than early.

How it's built

This Arkanoid is written from scratch in TypeScript and drawn on an HTML canvas, with no game framework. The simulation lives in its own module with no canvas or DOM code, and a small shared engine steps it at a fixed 60 Hz inside requestAnimationFrame. The ball moves in steps of at most one pixel, so even at top speed it cannot skip through a brick. Ball-to-brick contact is a circle-versus-rectangle test: the game finds the point on the brick closest to the ball's centre, then bounces the ball off the side it overlaps least. Sound effects are synthesised with the Web Audio API, and on phones on-screen buttons move the paddle and launch the ball.

This is an unofficial tribute written from scratch for the browser. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the owners of the original game.