Chapter 2. How to Play

The player is presented with a game field containing a number of bricks. A ball travels across the screen, bouncing off the top and side walls. When a brick is hit, the ball bounces away and the brick is destroyed. The player loses a life when the ball touches the bottom of the field. To prevent this from happening, the player has to use a movable bar to bounce the ball upward, situated at the bottom of the window. The purpose of the game is to progress through the levels destroying all bricks present in each, and trying to get a highscore.

Some bricks have a special behavior, or may let a gift fall down when hit. The gifts can be caught with the bar, their behavior can be either positive or negative. For further information on the different types of bricks and gifts see the next chapter.

To fire the ball press the spacebar, to move the bar use the mouse or the arrow keys. The ball will bounce in the direction of the side of the bar it bounced on hit, the more it bounces near the left end of the bar the more it will bounce toward the left, the same applies for the right side; if it bounces in the middle of the bar it will bounce straight toward the top.

If you enable the option Fire on mouse click in the settings dialog, you can click with the left mouse button to fire. Enabling the option will make the game steal the mouse cursor, pause the game to get the cursor back.