Breakup: A Neon Brick-Breaker Roguelite
Breakup is a free neon brick-breaker played as a roguelite, written in C with SDL3. Towers instead of walls, perks, bosses and a daily run with no server.
I'd like to introduce one of my two new games - Breakup, a neon brick-breaker played as a roguelite. It takes the oldest idea in arcade gaming - a paddle, a ball and a wall of bricks - and asks what happens when the wall stops sitting still on one screen and every game becomes a run with its own rules.
Breakup is free and you can play it right in your browser on itch.io, with nothing to install. There are also downloadable versions for Windows, macOS and Linux. A typical run takes about an hour, but one tower is enough to find out whether it's your kind of game.
Towers Instead of Walls
In a classic brick-breaker, you clear the wall and move on. In Breakup, every level is a tower - fifteen bricks wide and up to sixty rows tall - and the camera climbs it with your ball. You are not there to clear the wall. You are there to find the crystals buried in it. Shatter all of them and the level ends, whatever else is still standing.
Everything else in the tower is either in your way or a weapon:
- Steel - Never breaks. It isn't an obstacle, it's the shape of the room, and learning to bank shots off it is half the game
- Explosive bricks - Take their neighbours with them, and those take theirs. One good shot can bring down half a tower
- Gold and tough bricks - Worth the extra hits if you have the time
- Enemies - Drifters, divers, splitters and saucers. None of them can kill you, but all of them stand exactly where your ball was going
There are four worlds - Cyan Dawn, Emerald Drift, Ember Fields and Violet Void - each with its own palette, sky, music and five hand-designed towers.
Every Game Is a Run
This is where the roguelite part comes in. A run has four acts, one for each world, and every act is three levels and a boss. The levels are drawn from the world's pool in a new order every time, and from the second act on they often arrive under a mutator - mirrored, armored, brittle, a gold rush or a swarm of enemies.
After every level you choose one of three perks and keep it for the rest of the run. There are fourteen of them, and none of them is simply a bigger number. Each one is a rule that hooks into something the game already does, so they stack into each other:
- Crystal Blast - Crystals explode when they break
- Chain Reaction - Every brick an explosion breaks counts towards your combo
- Inferno - Every explosion is wider while the fireball is lit
- Glass Cannon - Raises the combo cap from 5× to 8×, and makes the ball faster to pay for it
Take the first three together and a tower starts clearing itself. That moment, when separate small rules suddenly click into something much bigger, is what the roguelite genre does best.
Every act ends with a boss - seven in total, and no two fight the same. A boss is the game's own vocabulary turned against you: a crystal hidden behind a ring of armour plates that orbit it, and the only way in is through a gap. And after each boss comes the most important question of the run: cash out, or go deeper? Cash out and you keep every point. Go deeper and the score multiplier rises, but a curse comes with it, and if you die before the next chance to cash out, you lose half of everything you scored since.
The Combo Is the Real Game
Every brick you break before the ball returns to your paddle raises a multiplier, up to 5×. A tower taken in one long, greedy chain pays several times what the same tower pays when played safe. And there's one small detail that changes how it feels: each link in the chain rings a semitone higher than the last one. A good combo doesn't repeat the same noise - it climbs a musical scale, so you can literally hear how well you're playing.
The power-ups follow the same philosophy of decisions rather than free gifts. The most common capsule in the game is Shrink. It makes your paddle small and hard to play with - but while it lasts, the combo multiplier is one step higher. So every capsule drifting down at you is a choice, and you have to make it while it falls.
Under the Hood: C, SDL3 and No Images
Breakup is written in C17 with SDL3. Just like with Jetshot, there isn't a single image file in the game. All graphics are generated procedurally at startup - the bricks, the neon glow, the parallax starfields, the bloom pass over the whole field. Every sound effect is synthesized in code by a small built-in chiptune engine.
The only things the game doesn't generate are the font and the music. The soundtrack is nineteen looping chiptune tracks from Three Red Hearts by Abstraction, released into the public domain - and it is the reason the game is about 20 MB instead of a few hundred kilobytes.
The final boss, The Sovereign, even speaks. Its voice is five sung vowels synthesized at startup. Each one starts as a sawtooth wave, which contains every harmonic just like a human throat does, and runs through three resonators tuned to the formants of that vowel - which is all that makes an "ah" different from an "oo". It's sung in three voices at once, at the root, a fifth above and an octave below, because The Sovereign is not a person and shouldn't sound like one. One vowel per syllable, pitched from the word being said, and you get the melody of speech with nothing in it to understand.
The browser version is the very same C code compiled to WebAssembly with Emscripten. Your settings, unlocked perks and best runs survive closing the tab thanks to SDL storing its save directory in the browser's IndexedDB. The game itself never touches the network.
A Daily Run Without a Server
One feature deserves a closer look - the daily run. Once a day, everybody who plays gets the same run: the same towers in the same order, the same mutators and the same perk offers. It keeps its own best score, so you can compare results with friends.
The interesting part is that there's no server behind it. No backend decides what today's run looks like, and nothing is downloaded. The trick is that the seed is the date. All randomness in a run comes from a deterministic pseudo-random number generator (PCG), and the same seed always produces the same sequence of numbers. Feed it today's date and every copy of the game, anywhere in the world, builds exactly the same run - even offline.
This works only because the game is strict about where randomness comes from. A single call to the system clock or an unseeded random function in the wrong place would quietly break it. That's why the test suite checks the run as a function of its seed: the same seed must always produce the same levels, mutators and perk offers.
A Game That Photographs Itself
Having no image files has one funny consequence. When it came to screenshots for the itch.io store page, there was simply nothing to crop. Every pixel is drawn at runtime, so the only place a picture of Breakup exists is the frame buffer of a running game.
So the game takes its own photos. A single command starts it in a scripted mode where it plays itself - the paddle simply follows the ball - and saves screenshots and GIFs at given frames. In this mode, the game advances by a fixed time step instead of the wall clock, so a frame number is a moment in the game, not a moment on the machine. With a fixed seed, two runs produce byte-identical pictures, and whenever the art changes, the whole press kit can be regenerated instead of re-photographed by hand.
A related feature is available to players too. Press G and the last eight seconds of play are saved as a GIF. The game keeps a rolling buffer of recent frames all the time, so that perfect chain reaction you want to show somebody is already recorded by the time you reach for the key. The GIF encoder is written from scratch, LZW compression included. (This one only works in the downloaded versions, since the browser has nowhere to put the file.)
Play Breakup
Breakup is free on Windows, macOS and Linux, and playable in the browser with nothing to install. I recommend playing with the sound on - half of what the game does, it does with noise: the rising scale of a combo, the crack of a crystal, the jingle when a tower finally comes down.
If you enjoy arcade games, I'd love for you to play Breakup on itch.io and let me know how far you got. And if you're curious how it's built, the source code is on GitHub under the MIT license.
Final Thoughts
Breakup was a reminder of how much depth can hide in a simple mechanic. A ball bouncing off a paddle is one of the oldest ideas in video games, and yet by adding towers, perks and a single risky question after every boss, it becomes a game where every run tells a different story.
It also continues the approach I took with Jetshot: generating graphics and sound in code instead of drawing them by hand isn't a limitation. It's a different way of thinking about game art - one that programmers can feel right at home in.
Thank you for reading, and good luck with the crystals!