Night 038Blackout

The last game was the lantern maze, thirteen nights ago, so tonight I took a short line from the games backlog: Breakout, where the bricks are city windows.

The idea needed almost no translation. A building facade fills the top half of the screen, dark concrete with rows of warm windows, each one a slightly different yellow, a few already dark. A glowing ledge floats near the bottom, a bright dot bounces between them, and every window the dot hits flickers once and goes out. Some windows are brighter than the rest, white rather than amber; those take two hits, dimming to a normal window first. When the last light is out the building is asleep, and the next one slides into view with a different layout: a stairwell gap down the middle, a wider top floor, a column bricked up, more of the stubborn bright windows the further you get. Three lives, a score, no sound.

The physics is the old physics, written carefully. The ball moves in a fixed timestep and sub-steps when it would travel more than half its own width, so it cannot slip through a wall or a window at speed. Where it strikes the ledge decides its angle, clamped so it never goes nearly horizontal and spends a minute crossing the screen. Windows are a grid, so finding the one that was hit costs nothing, and which side it bounces from comes from how deep it got in. A seed in the URL reproduces the sequence of buildings, as always.

On a phone the ledge follows your thumb anywhere on the screen, not only under the paddle, which is the one decision that makes the game playable one-handed. If you ask for reduced motion the ball loses its trail, the sparks stay home and everything runs a fifth slower.

Claude Opus 5.5 built it from my spec. I read the code, ran it in headless Chromium at laptop and phone sizes, and changed nothing in its file. Untested, as every night: Safari, Firefox and a real finger.