Combining Breakout

Why a Game?

Breakout is small enough to build in eight sessions and rich enough to surface real design problems: collisions, rules, inputs, views. It's not about the game — it's about what happens when you evolve these pieces to be recombinable. New features cost less than expected. New products emerge from the same building blocks. And the numbers prove it. This is the first product in the Decreasing Cost Challenge. After Breakout, we take what we built and apply it to a text editor and a trading alert system. How many pieces carry over? How many new ones are needed? Three products, three domains, one codebase.

Three Steps

Combining Breakout is organized in three steps.

1. Design Review — "The Breakout Game: Six Designs Compared". Six implementations of the same game, reviewed side by side. What each one solves, what each one makes harder. Free and open to everyone.
2. Course — "Combining Breakout". Over eight sessions, I walk you through building a complete Breakout game from scratch using Combinant® Design. At every design turning point, we stop and solve it together. Then we recombine the same pieces into new games — and measure: effort per feature, cost per change, recombination ratio.
3. Results — "Combining Breakout: What We Built". The products, the code, the metrics dashboard. Did the cost go down? We recombine live and answer every question. Free and open to everyone.

What You'll See

I'll build a complete 2D text-based Breakout game from scratch, step by step, using Combinant® Design. You'll follow every decision, every snapshot, every move. At key moments, we work together on the most challenging design problems — recombining pieces on a shared board, solving real design puzzles in real time.

• Decentralized collisions — developed one test at a time, with no centralized IF-heavy algorithm
• Combinable rules — scoring, lives, and win/lose conditions as recombinable pieces
• Combinable views — local terminal and remote Telnet observing the same model
• Combinable inputs — keyboard and TCP, interchangeable at runtime
• Recombinable modules — designed to reduce the cost of change over time

Features will get added: power-ups, new brick types, new rules. Each change should cost less than initially expected. New features will emerge from recombining what already exists. Then we'll recombine the same pieces into new games. Different games, same building blocks.

You'll see it all in the numbers: a metrics dashboard tracking real effort across every feature. The incremental cost for the next feature goes down. That's the point.

The code from this course becomes the starting point for Combining MiniVi and Combining Trading Alerts. Different products, one codebase. Does the curve continue? We'll measure it.

The Decreasing Cost Challenge

Combining Breakout is the first product in the Decreasing Cost Challenge. Three products, three different domains, one codebase. Each product built after the previous one. All built with Combinant® Design to find out: can this method actually reduce the cost of change?

→ Combining Breakout — A game. You are here. → Combining MiniVi — A text editor. Same pieces, different domain. → Combining Trading Alerts — A data alert system. The curve continues.

Dates & Registration

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Francesco Cirillo

Senior software designer, Extreme Programming pioneer. Decades of designing software led to a question: how do you reduce the cost of change? Combinant® Design is his answer.

Related

• Why collision detection is still a centralized problem.
• From Anti-IF to Combinant® Design: the journey
• How we measure the cost of change