Neon Breaker build notes: brick-breaker physics in one evening-sized file
For weeks the homepage teased a blurred card called "Project: Neon." Today it has a name: Neon Breaker, a synthwave brick-breaker and the arcade's second cabinet. These are the build notes.
The paddle is the steering wheel
Brick-breakers live or die on one rule: where the ball meets the paddle decides where it flies next. We map the contact point to a launch angle â center sends it straight up, edges fire it out at up to about 65 degrees â while keeping total speed constant. Physics purists wince, but this is the genre's secret handshake: it turns a wall of bricks into an aiming game.
Bouncing off bricks without a physics engine
The classic amateur bug is the ball "tunneling" along a brick row, flipping direction every frame. The fix costs four lines: on contact, compare how deeply the ball overlaps the brick horizontally versus vertically, and bounce on the axis with the shallower overlap. Shallow-side reflection resolves corner hits believably and killed every glitchy ricochet we could produce in testing.
Combos make the score mean something
Flat scoring makes every run feel the same, so bricks pay a multiplier that climbs with each brick broken since the ball last touched your paddle. Trap the ball in a pocket behind the wall and the glow-chain pays Ã4, Ã5, Ã6... Risk ties in neatly: the longer the ball runs free, the harder the catch when it finally comes down. Armored bricks (two hits) guard the pockets on later grids.
Synthwave on a budget
The whole look is canvas paint: a faint grid, one radial horizon glow, and shadowBlur as the neon. Bricks are dark fills with glowing strokes; the ball gets a soft halo; broken bricks shatter into a dozen gravity-affected particles. There's not a single image file in the game â and on phones it still runs at a smooth 60fps, because rectangles and glow are exactly what GPUs eat for breakfast.
Numbers
- Five levels, from a straight warm-up wall to a full armored grid.
- One file. No dependencies. First playable build to shipped page: two days.
- Best score is stored on your device only, like every game here.
Play Neon Breaker â and if you clear level five, we want to hear about it.