← AI Game Fusion
Fusion #12 · Breakout × Missile Command

DEBRIS

SCORE0
CITIES6
INTERCEPTORS6
WAVE1 / 5
WALL56
BALLS3

DEBRIS

Six cities. One wall. Everything you knock off it comes down on them.

Break the wall to win. Every brick you break falls on your own ground. A destroyed brick drops where it stood and keeps falling in a straight line, so the wall is a map of your cities — the column standing directly over a city is the column that will kill it, and the two either side of it come down harmlessly in the gutter. Choosing where to attack is choosing who to bomb.
Hard bricks drop seekers. They take two hits, they sit at the top of the wall, and what falls out of them steers toward whichever city is still alive and close enough to reach. A seeker has no safe lane. Punching through to the top row is the best moment in Breakout and the worst moment in this game.
The cities are your batteries. Every brick you break pays into your interceptor pool at a rate set by how many cities are still standing — and they launch the missiles too, and multiply every brick you score. Lose one and the sky above the other five gets harder to hold — so a city is never simply a life.
Click to detonate. An interceptor blooms where you put it and anything caught in it goes up — and takes its neighbours with it, so a shot into a cluster is worth three into single fragments. The pool is small, and it is paid for by the bricks you break — so the sky always owes you roughly as many missiles as it is throwing at you, and never more. Waiting is how you make one missile worth three; waiting is also how a fragment gets low enough to reach a city.
Or block it with the paddle — and pay for it. The paddle stops debris dead, but every fragment it eats scuffs it narrower, and it grows back slowly. Shielding your cities with your body makes you worse at the half of the game that keeps the ball alive. That is the whole trade: the interceptor is what you spend to keep your paddle whole.
LANES — LOADED OVER EACH CITY / INBOUND
FIELD
PADDLE← →  or  A D
LAUNCH BALLSPACE
INTERCEPTCLICK the sky
PAUSE · MUTE · RESTARTP · M · R
PLUMBThe bright line under a lane is the drop line: whatever you break in the column it runs through lands on that city. The two dim columns either side of it fall in the gutter and do nothing. One brick in three is loaded, and you can see which.
SEEKERHard bricks (two hits, top of the wall, drawn in rose) drop a seeker instead of a shard. It falls slower and it steers toward the nearest living city it can still reach — and how far that is depends on how high up the wall it was born, because steering takes time it only has while it is falling. A top-row seeker roams a third of the arena; one from the bottom course barely leaves its lane. There is no gutter you can give a seeker away to, which is why you cannot simply abandon five cities to make the wall harmless: every seeker within reach of the one you kept is now aimed at it.
BATTERYInterceptors launch from your nearest surviving city, and the pool is paid for by the bricks you break, at an exchange rate set by how many cities you have left. The thing that makes a fragment is the thing that buys the missile for it — so there is no stalling your way to a full rack. Score is per brick × cities standing. Three things get worse the moment one falls, which is what makes "let that one go" an expensive decision rather than a free one.
CHAINA fragment killed inside a bloom detonates in turn and the blast passes on, so a single interceptor into a tight cluster can clear a whole lane's worth. Chained kills score more, and the score card counts your best chain. Firing at the first thing you see is the expensive way to play.
SCUFFBlocking a fragment costs paddle width, and the bar above the arena is what is left. It regrows, slowly. The floor is marked — you can never be scuffed away entirely — but a paddle at the floor is a different game, and the ball gets faster with every return you make.
TEMPOThe ball speeds up on every paddle return and does not slow down until the wall is cleared, so stalling is not safe — a rally you spend not breaking anything is a rally spent making the ball harder to keep. Clearing a wall rebuilds one city, in the lane that will need it most.
KEYS← → or A D move the paddle, Space launches the ball, click anywhere in the sky to detonate an interceptor there. P pauses, M mutes, R restarts.