A little article I wrote on the development of Beautiful Bricks. It didn't get used as intended so sharing it here as it might be useful insight. Strangely for a 'Devlog' its written in third person but you still get the sense of it - Matt 

Beautiful Bricks is a true labour of love. Ready Wolf (Matthew Vecchio) started the project three and a half years ago with the intention of ‘reinventing’ the Brick Breaker genre, or at least to try to fix some of the gameplay issues associated with this tiresome genre. From early in development, Ready Wolf’s focus was to make a Brick Breaker ‘new, exciting and fresh for a modern audience’.  

Inspiration for the unique ball physics came from real life arcade pinball machines.  Ready Wolf purchased his own pinball machine about the same time as he started developing the game. The idea of having more ball control came because of frustration with of the lack of ball control in most Brick Breaker games. Ready Wolf, a retro gamer, drew a lot of inspiration from the golden age of Arcade gaming. The game runs of ‘credits’, 3 letter highscores and game challenges is akin to ‘arcade difficulty’.  A love of 8 bit and 16 bit video games is noticeable too with the game’s chunky pixel graphics, 16 colour palette and its aspect ratio of 4:3.

Interestingly, the bulk the soundtrack was written when Ready Wolf was in his late teens, over 10 years ago. Back then he didn’t know anything about programming but dreamed of being a video game music composer. The songs that were used to make up the soundtrack were cherry picked from  old compositions, then rearranged and refined to suit the gameplay. ‘It was surreal working with music that I had written 10 + years ago,' he said. ' There are a few things I feel I could do better now, but I was surprised at how good it was.'

Beautiful Bricks is now finished and ready to be mastered. Will Beautiful Bricks inspire a new generation of Brick Breakers? Let’s hope so. Game on.