Brick tunnel
A brick-breaker down a 3-D tube — your paddle runs round the rim, the chequered ball rides the wall and bounces off the far end, and the bricks sit on rings receding into the depth — with multi-hit, metal and explosive bricks, spinning rings, five power-ups, boss rings, ten built-in levels and seeded generated ones.
Added
How to use it
Breakout turned inside out. You look down a tube; the bricks are rings on its wall at different depths, some of them turning. Your paddle is a curved tile that runs round the near rim, and the ball — the red-and-white chequered Boing ball, as in Boing pinball — rides the wall, bounces off the bricks and the far end cap, and comes back to you somewhere round the rim. Miss it and it’s gone.
How to play
Press Start game. The ball sits on the paddle until you launch it (or for three seconds).
Turn the paddle |
Move the mouse (click the tunnel first to capture it; Esc lets go), drag on a touch screen, ← → or A D, or a gamepad’s left stick or d-pad. |
Launch and fire |
Space, a click, a tap (or the FIRE button on a touch screen), gamepad A. |
Pause |
P, Esc or gamepad Start; the game pauses by itself when you switch tabs. M mutes. |
With Follow paddle on (the default) the tunnel turns so your paddle stays at the bottom of the screen, and moving left or right turns it. With it off, the tunnel stays still and the paddle goes to the point on the rim you point at. Where the ball hits the paddle decides where it goes: the middle sends it straight down the tube, the edges send it round.
Bricks: blue break in one hit, green in two, gold in three. Grey metal never breaks — go round it. Red bricks explode and take their neighbours and anything just in front of or behind them with them. Some rings turn, and they can turn both ways.
Broken bricks sometimes drop a capsule; catch it with the paddle:
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W — wide paddle for 15 seconds
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M — multiball: every ball splits in three
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S — slow ball for 12 seconds
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L — laser for 15 seconds: fire shoots two bolts from the paddle’s ends, which also knock out boss shots
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G — magnet for 15 seconds: the paddle catches the ball; turn to aim and fire to let go
Every fifth level has a boss ring at the far end: thick segments that take several hits, a ring that speeds up and changes direction, and an eye that fires at your paddle. A hit stuns the paddle for a second and takes away a wide paddle.
Levels 1 to 10 are built in. From level 11 the levels are generated from a seed — more rings, more metal, faster spinning, a faster ball — with a boss every five. Seeded run on the title screen plays generated levels from the start; the same seed always gives the same levels, so you can give a friend the number. Every generated level is checked before you get it: a flood fill of the tube wall makes sure every breakable brick can be reached past the metal. You get an extra ball every 40,000 points. Your best ten scores stay in this browser.
The toolbar has sound, music, screen shake, low graphics and the mouse and touch sensitivity, and Full screen gives the tunnel the whole screen. If the game can’t keep up it switches to low graphics by itself.
How it works
The ball moves on the inside of the tube, so the physics is two-dimensional on the unrolled wall — distance round the tube (which wraps) and depth — at a fixed 120 steps a second, each split so the ball moves at most a third of its radius at a time; it can’t skip through a brick or past the paddle however fast it gets. The ball never runs round the tube for ever: after every bounce at least a quarter of its speed is along the tube.
Sound effects and the music loop are synthesised with Web Audio as you play. Exploding bricks pulse slowly; if your system asks for reduced motion there is no screen shake and the pulsing stops.
Feedback is a gift. Something to improve, a feature to add, or a bug? Tell me.
Runs entirely in your browser — network requests go only to the services named on this page.