Breakout Game Project

The Challenge

One of my personal challenges—something I’ve been mulling over for years—is collision detection. We all know classic 2D games like Mario and Space Invaders. And if you think about it, the real magic, the moment that makes you cheer for Mario or brace yourself in Space Invaders, comes down to one thing: collisions. Without them, there’s no game.

I’ve read countless articles and books on collision detection algorithms. And, time and again, the answer is the same: a centralized, algorithmic system that decides “from above” whether Mario has hit a coin or if a bullet from your base collides with an invader. This inevitably leads to code heavy with if statements—an omniscient logic that checks every condition.

But what if there’s another way? What if collisions could be detected directly, combining objects in a decentralized, emergent, and recombinable way? And what if we developed this system one test at a time, incrementally and carefully?

Project Breakout was created to explore that question. It applies Combinant® Principles and Practices to build a system that is flexible, adaptable, and developed incrementally—one test at a time.

And we won’t stop at collisions. We’ll develop the rules so they can be combined and extended—scoring, lives, and win/lose conditions—without rewriting the core.

The same game can run with multiple views (one or many local ANSI terminals and one or many remote Telnet views), and we’ll make input pluggable (keyboard and TCP events).

Every part is recombinable, so the system can grow by combination, not conditionals.