Paranoid

An Arkanoid clone started in 2014, rescued in 2026 and ported from SFML to SDL3. Break the wall, catch the capsules, chase the high score.

Running

make run        # build (Debug) and launch
make release    # optimized build
make dev        # build and launch with developer cheats (DEV_MODE)
make help       # every target

Dependencies (Fedora): SDL3-devel SDL3_image-devel gtest-devel cmake gcc-c++.

Controls

Action	Keyboard	Mouse	Gamepad
Move the paddle	Left / Right	move	left stick / d-pad
Release the ball / fire lasers	Space	left click	south button
Pause (Resume / Main menu / Quit)	Escape	-	Start
Fullscreen	F11	-	-
Menus: navigate / adjust / pick	arrows / Enter	hover / click	d-pad / south

The paddle follows the mouse at the same top speed as the keyboard - no input is faster than another.

Capsules

10% of destroyed bricks drop a capsule. Mode capsules (marked "timed") last 10 seconds and any new capsule cancels the one in effect.

Capsule	Effect
	Break - jump straight to the next stage
	Catch (timed) - the paddle holds the ball; release with Space
	Disruption - the ball splits in three
	Expand (timed) - wider paddle
	Laser (timed) - the paddle fires with Space
	Megaball (timed) - the ball smashes through bricks without bouncing
	Net (timed) - a barrier on the floor bounces the ball back
	Speed up (timed) - faster balls
	Reduce (timed) - narrower paddle
	Slow (timed) - slower balls
	Twist (timed) - a moving paddle puts spin on the ball (Magnus curve)
	Extra life

Scoring

A brick is worth 10 points per life it takes to kill - silver (2 lives) scores 20, gold (3) scores 30 - awarded only when it dies. Chipping a life scores nothing, and indestructible bricks never score. The high score persists across runs.

Stages

Stages are plain-text ASCII art in media/stages/: 15 lines of 15 characters, one per brick, played in filename order. See media/stages/README.md for the legend - add a .txt file and it is in the game.

Map editor

EDITOR on the main menu opens the stage editor:

MOVE: ARROWS | PAINT: ENTER | ERASE: DEL | TYPE: Q/E
SAVE: S | LOAD: L | MENU: ESC

It saves to ~/.local/share/paranoid/custom.map in the stage-file format, so a finished map ships by copying it into media/stages/.

Options

Scale mode (letterbox keeps the aspect, stretch fills the window), fullscreen, and separate music / effects volumes, adjusted with Left / Right. Settings and the high score persist under ~/.local/share/paranoid/.

Development

The code is split in two layers: src/engine/ is a small reusable, SFML-shaped facade over SDL3 (window, sprites, text, audio, gamepad), and src/C*.{hpp,cpp} is the game itself (states, entities, menus).

make test        # ~100 GoogleTest cases, headless (dummy SDL drivers)
make sanitize    # test suite under ASan/UBSan
make leak-check  # tests + a game smoke run under valgrind
make format      # clang-format over every source

CI builds and tests every push on Linux x86_64, Linux arm64 and Windows (MSYS2), and uploads playable artifacts for each platform.