About
Picotan is a simple but addictive brick-breaker game inspired by the original BBTAN (2015), and similar titles Ballz (2017), Holedown (2018), Piffle (2018).
Instructions
- Launch balls at bricks and destroy as many as possible in a single turn
- Each time a ball hits a brick, that brick's health reduces by one
- Once a brick reaches zero health, it is destroyed
- New bricks will spawn with more health after each round
- If a brick reaches the bottom of the screen, the game is over
- Try and reach the highest score possible!
Controls
This game supports keyboard, gamepad, mouse, and touch input, all of which can be switched between on the fly.
- Z / Left mouse (hold): Aim shot
- Z / Left mouse (release while aiming): Launch balls
- X / Right mouse (release while aiming): Cancel aim mode
- X / Right mouse (release while launching): Recall all balls / skips current turn
- You can also press the Recall button that appears while launching
Brick Colors
Normal bricks change color based on their health relative to the number of balls:
- Red: Brick health is more than twice the current ball count
- Yellow: Brick health is higher than current ball count
- Blue: Brick health is equal or less than current ball count
- Gray: Triggers a powerup when destroyed (see below)
Powerups
Gray bricks that spawn will trigger different effects when destroyed.
- Ball: Increases maximum ball count by one
- Bomb: Destroys surrounding bricks in a 3 x 3 radius
- Row: Destroys all bricks on then same row
- Col: Destroys all bricks on the same column
- Aim: Temporarily increases aim range (3 turns)
This is super addictive! Juicy visuals, fun gameplay, catchy music, loads of polish, this game's got it all! It is a little annoying to have the tutorial every run, but it doesn't really interfere with the gameplay much anyway. My best score so far was 2463760, but I'm going to keep trying for more!
Thanks @PicoCoder for checking it out! I agree having the tutorial show up every time isn't ideal. Things are pretty busy at the moment but when I have a chance I'll see if I can adjust that. Appreciate the feedback!
Another suggestion, you might want to increase the difficulty curve :) It seems like at a certain point, the amount of balls you have and the difficulty of the blocks scale together at pretty much the same rate, so it's possible to go on pretty much forever. Perhaps the difficulty should be a slow quadratic or exponential curve, so that at high enough levels (20, 50 even?) it starts to noticeably outpace the amount of balls you're getting and eventually the game gets difficult enough that you can't play forever, kind of like Tetris. I also recommend reducing the delay before the "speed up" mode takes effect, to prevent you from having to wait so long in the late game when you have 50+ balls. The fact that I got this far before getting bored is a testament to how entertaining this game is, though!
I find the difficulty perfectly balanced as its always the same, i feel is skills from level 1 to level 300… and I have never been able to play forever 🤣
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