Breakiod: How It All Started!

When GBA Jam 2026 rolled around, I had a wild idea: gather a graphic designer and a musician to try and whip up a game for the jam. JPtom came up with THE idea, and Cyberdeous jumped in to handle the music.

Gameplay

Well, it’s a Breakout like game so you’ve got to smash everything in sight until you reach the exit!

Don’t waste too much time admiring the scenery though or Solid Snail will come bother you, and trust me, you do not want that.

- Press L/R on the title screen to increase or decrease the music volume.

- The metal ball can damage the paddle. If it strikes the wooden parts, it will gradually wear down. The more the ball hits the edges of the paddle, the more angular its trajectory becomes.

- How to kill blobs :
Watch out, blobs love electricity! Charge your balls to blast them

- You can dash with left or right + button A
Oh, and dashing into the walls might just help!

- Sometimes, smash those planks to break free!

- Other times, hunt the door switches and flip them all!

The team

Graphic Designer’s Note: It started as a mockup animation i did years ago, a brick-breaker that feels heavy, brutal, with an emphasis on destruction steps and a breakable paddle to spice things up. The GBA Jam was the perfect occasion to try make it come to life. Glad i could find competent fellows to handle the coding and the music (domains that are beyond me).

Musician’s Note:  When CeL asked us if we were okay to do some music for GBA Jam project we were like it was not possible. Our main works are for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and we were not used to GBA way of handling music. When we saw the first screens of the game, we said ourselves " We must do something" but sadly we were not very available. We talked about tracker .mod / .it style of music and it was marvelous because we had already done that kind of music more than 20 years ago. We took some of our old files, pimped them a little and voilà, done. We are so glad helping a little team of great human beings and we think the overall result is very good

Coder’s Take:  For this project, my mission: - find a dev environment that let me code at lightning speed - no time to deep-dive into the GBA’s hardware like I did for the GB/GBC - no time to code in assembly here! After testing roughly 156 solutions (okay, maybe not that many), I went with Butano... and it was a game-changer! Only catch: I had to learn C++. But with my C background, I picked it up in no time!

Tools

- DevKitPro : https://devkitpro.org/wiki/Getting_Started

- libtonc : https://github.com/gbadev-org/libtonc

- Butano : https://gvaliente.github.io/butano/

- C++  : Beginning Programming with C++ For Dummies

Proudly made without AI to generate any part of this game.