readme

Microwindows genesis was with the NanoGUI project, and is now the primary distribution for both th

NanoBreaker by Alex Holden <[e-mail]>
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This game is a clone of Breakout. It has many similarities to another Breakout
clone called Arkanoid. One of the main advances of the game over most other
Breakout clones is its extensive use of alpha blending- all of the bricks,
bats, the ball, and the splash graphics can be loaded from PNG files with
alpha channels, and they will be blended onto the background screen with full
translucency. Also, bricks which require multiple hits to destroy become more
tranlucent with each subsequent hit, and when changing levels there is a
gradual blended fade between the old level and the new one.

The object of the game is to complete all of the levels. In order to complete
each level it is necessary to destroy all of the bricks which it is possible to
destroy (some bricks are indestructable and hence do not need to be destroyed
to advance to the next level). The way to destroy bricks is to hit them with
the ball (sometimes they only need to be hit once, sometimes they need to be
hit several times). When you fail to hit the ball with your bat and it falls
to the bottom of the screen, it is lost and you are given another ball from
the row at the top of the screen. You only have a limited number of balls
though, and if you run out then the game is lost. Every time you successfully
complete a level, you are given some extra balls as a reward. Some bricks have
power-ups or power-downs hidden behind them, which appear when the brick is
destroyed. You must catch them as they fall down the screen in order to
activate them.

Several power-ups and power-downs are available in the game:
WideBat makes the bat wider.
SlowMotion makes the ball move more slowly.
sTickyBat makes the ball stick to the bat every time it hits it.
PowerBall makes the ball able to destroy multiple-hit bricks and even normally
indestructable bricks with a single hit.
NarrowBat makes the bat narrower.
FastMotion make the ball move more quickly.

The power-ups and power-downs all expire after some amount of time (configurable
in the game file). Catching a power-up increases your score by some amount and
catching a power-down decreases it. Destroying an ordinary brick increases
your score by a small amount, but some bricks have bonusses hidden behind them
which can increase your score by a much larger amount.

There are two ways to control the game: with the mouse (or touchscreen) and
with the keyboard (note that if you are using a PDA with some input buttons on
it some of them may be configured to act as cursor keys).  With the mouse,
clicking a button advances from the title screen to the first level, and then
clicking it again launches the ball from the bat. Moving it left and right
causes the bat to move left and right. With the keyboard, the space bar
performs the same function as the mouse button, and the left and right cursor
keys are used to move the bat left and right.

There are two other keys which may be of use: F1 is used to pause and
unpause the game, and F2 is used to forfeit the current ball (may be
necessary in some advanced levels where it is possible for the ball to become
caught in a trap of indestructable bricks).

The game is described by an ASCII level file which allows new levels to be
created very easily, and many aspects of the game to be easily modified.
For example, the default game file is optimised for display at a resolution of
640*480, but it is easy to make the bricks smaller or larger or to change the
size of the brick area in the game by modifiying parameters in the game file.

If you specify a filename on the command line, it will be used as the game file.
If it is in a directory other than the default game directory, the directory in
which it looks for the file (and for all the graphics files) can be given
on the command line using the "-d <directory>" option.