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 takes the 40-year-old brick breaker and rebuilds it 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 goal was to give a classic genre the decision density of a modern roguelite without losing its one-more-run pull, 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 for the paddle to catch, and mana fuels equippable abilities like Prism Beam, Shockwave, Recall, and Time Slow, cast at the ball’s position.
Progress that persists. Shards, perk levels, and unlocked abilities carry across runs, and 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 runs 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 with sub-second time-to-interactive. The feedback was tuned from watching people play, 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.