Arkanoid Remake

Overview

This was a team project that extended a base Arkanoid implementation with richer mechanics, a refactored OOP architecture, and new features divided among the group. The team added improved collision detection, multiple brick types, a power-up system, and level progression. My responsibility was the sound system: designing and implementing event-driven audio feedback across the full game.

Adding sound to a game requires hooking into the event model without creating tight coupling between audio logic and game logic. I designed the sound layer to respond to game events (brick destroyed, ball bounced, power-up collected, level complete, game over) through a clean interface, so the audio system could be developed and tested independently.

Tech Stack

My Contribution: Sound System

• Event-driven audio architecture: designed a SoundManager class that other components could call without knowing how audio worked, keeping sound logic decoupled from game logic.
• Audio loading and playback: used Java's javax.sound.sampled API to load WAV files into Clip objects at startup, avoiding disk reads during gameplay that would cause audio lag.
• Game event coverage: wired sound effects to every meaningful game event: ball hitting a brick, ball hitting the paddle, ball hitting a wall, brick destroyed, power-up collected, level complete, life lost, and game over.
• Overlapping sounds: handled the case where the same sound fires multiple times in rapid succession (e.g. ball destroying several bricks at once) by opening a new Clip instance per play rather than reusing a single shared instance.
• Team integration: coordinated with teammates so the sound API was simple enough to call from the collision and game-state code they were writing, without requiring them to understand the audio implementation.

What the Team Built

Context for the full project my sound system was integrated into:

• Improved collision detection: side-specific bounce logic replacing the original naive axis flip, fixing corner-clipping bugs.
• Brick class hierarchy: base Brick class with subclasses for standard, tough (two-hit), and exploding bricks.
• Power-up system: falling power-ups (wide paddle, extra ball, slow ball) implemented as individual classes behind a shared interface.
• Game state and level progression: lives system, score tracker, win/lose conditions, and level loading from 2D brick-type arrays.

Challenges & What I Learned

• Audio lag from loading on demand: my first attempt loaded audio files from disk each time a sound fired, which caused a noticeable delay on the first play. Pre-loading all clips at startup eliminated the lag entirely.
• Concurrent sound playback: a single Clip can only play once at a time; restarting it cuts off the previous play. The fix was opening a fresh clip instance per event rather than sharing one.
• Designing a clean API for teammates: the sound system had to be easy enough that teammates could add a one-line call from their code without understanding javax.sound.sampled. Writing for other developers is a different skill than writing for yourself.
• Integration in a team project: working against code written by others, rather than code I wrote, required reading and understanding their event model before designing how audio would hook into it.