Even though as a child we had played a good handful of Breakout or Arkanoid games we never really been caught by it's (potential) appeal and if really want to pay homage to these arcade classics we have to put our spins (yes many spins !) on it.
Initially we wanted to make a game that reflects on many many classics at once, references them in levels, eastereggs or whatever possibly could come to our mind. Inbetween these thoughts there popped up the thought of scrapping it and do a remake of SpyHunter, since that would have been not only superfun to do, but also a loooooot easier. However we had wanted to really accept the challenge of taking the brickbreaker genre and make it our own in some kind of way. So Daniele had these ideas of putting a little tetris in there as well and how that could be combined - so that's how Stackout was born.
The first draft was concepted around a circular pad in the center of the screen and bricks being placed around that. The bounce of the ball would have been regular / linear after touching the pad of the player while after the first bounce on the "outside" it would be drawn back towards the center.
The circular pad would act as a planet of some sort, which drew the ball with its center of gravity. Intriguing to Daniele on paper, since he loves all kind of physics and gravity elements in game - however the prototype that was made on the fly was.....um......interesting - yeh, let's put it like that....it was highly interesting :D
Luckily we had another idea to follow. We imagined the bricks to have several floors stacked (yup, that's the worldplay - haha :D) on each other and BAM! we're Stackout.
