Prism Break

A neon roguelite brick breaker: shatter waves, draft upgrades, and push your run further.

Built with: React 19 · TanStack Start · Vite 7 · Tailwind v4 · Web Audio API · Canvas 2D

Overview

Prism Break reimagines the 40-year-old brick breaker as a roguelite. Each run layers draft-based upgrades, an active ability system fed by mana orbs, and a persistent “Prism Tree” that carries progress between sessions. The aim was to give a classic genre the decision density of a modern roguelite without losing its one-more-run pull, all in a zero-install page that loads in under two seconds.

Highlights

Run-shaped pacing. Drafts, milestone unlocks, and escalating wave stingers replace the genre’s flat difficulty curve.
Active abilities, not passive paddling. Bricks drop mana orbs the paddle catches; mana fuels equippable abilities like Prism Beam, Shockwave, Recall, and Time Slow, cast at the ball’s position.
Meta progression that persists. Shards, perk levels, and unlocked abilities carry across runs; the Prism Tree tunes your starting stats between attempts.
Audio as game feel. Nearly every cue is synthesized at runtime. The wave-clear stinger is fully procedural and climbs a semitone every few waves, so progress is something you hear.
Readable chaos. A neon prism palette over deep navy keeps balls, bricks, orbs, and beams legible even at peak density.

Tech and Architecture

A single Canvas 2D loop drives bricks, particles, beams, ball trails, and shockwaves at 60fps, with game state kept outside React’s render path so the hot loop stays fast; the HUD, draft modal, and end screen are React on top. The game core is engine-free, with hand-rolled collision and pierce logic to keep the bundle small. Audio mixes a handful of samples with a small Web Audio synth. It is built on TanStack Start with file-based routing and baked-in share metadata, and deploys to the Cloudflare edge.

Outcomes

Prism Break ships the full roguelite loop (run, draft, die, spend shards, unlock, run again) as a single-page app with sub-second time-to-interactive. Audio and visual feedback were tuned from player reactions, most recently swapping a soft wave-clear ping for the escalating procedural stinger.

What’s Next

More ability archetypes and a third equippable slot, daily seeded runs with a shareable leaderboard, and an accessibility pass with colorblind palettes and a low-flash mode.