Lost at sea on a strange alien planet called Earth, your goal is to return to your home planet Circanoid in a galaxy far, far away. Fight your way through a number of challenging levels and ultimately defeat the ancient Guardian lurking in the depths of space.

Unlike traditional games in the Breakout genre, your paddle moves in a circle rather than left and right, making for an interesting challenge. Later levels contain enemies that will either disrupt your ball's path or will fire weapons at your paddle.

Circanoid is a game that appeals to all age groups and is fun in both 1 player mode and in 2 player cooperative mode.

The difficulty can be adjusted to provide everything from a zen-like experience on Easy mode to a hardcore arcade challenge on Superhuman difficulty. An optional Ironman mode will provide an added challenge by adding back all the bricks you have destroyed whenever you lose a life.

Challenge your family and friends with your own levels by using the built-in level editor.

While the game area is 2D, the background is 3D-animated with old-school parallax-scrolling.

How to play:

Main menu:

• Use the arrow keys to change options.
• Press Return to enter sub-menus and to start and quit the game.
• Entering a suitable password allows you to start the game from a later level. A password will be given to you for every three levels completed.
• In "paddle-centric mode" (1 player only), the paddle is always viewed at the bottom with the playing area rotating.
• In "world-centric mode", the view of the playing area is fixed and the paddle rotates.
• If Ironman mode is off, you do not have to play the current level from scratch when you lose a life; the only exception to this is the last level.

In-game:

• Move left and right to control the paddle. Use left and right arrow keys for Player 1 and A and D for Player 2.
• Left and right keys can be redefined for each player from the main menu.
• USB joysticks are supported.
• Press Space to pause/unpause the game.
• Press Escape to quit and get back to the main menu.
• Press Return to skip the death animation.

The above is all you need to know to play the game. The following is only needed if you'd like to design your own levels:

Level editor:

• M toggles mouse on/off. When on, the mouse will move the square selector. When off, use the arrow keys to move the selector.
• Select the brick type to paint with in the top-right corner, either with the mouse (easiest) or with the keyboard. Pressing e.g. C on the keyboard selects row C and pressing 3 selects column 3.
• Return toggles paint mode on/off (not needed when painting with the mouse). When on, the chosen brick type will be filled in at the location of the selector.
• The left mouse button paints and the right (or Backspace) erases.
• Press F to fill a larger area containing the selector with the currently selected brick type.
• To undo/redo operations, press -/+.
• Bricks can only be added in a circular region. The four bats show the rough boundary. Be aware that adding bricks too close to the boundary might make the level too hard and might intersect with the starting location(s) of the ball(s).
• Press Space to play test your level.
• Saving your own level will not erase the levels that come with the game. It will instead be saved as a "user level".
• Saving a user level containing no destroyable bricks will erase that level.
• U toggles whether the game is played with the normal levels or your own levels.

Credits:

Circanoid was created as a spare time project over a few months in 2022. I hope you will have as much fun playing it as I had developing it!

Christian Wulff-Nilsen (cwulnil@gmail.com)

Music:

• "37 ohmperios" by Rolemusic is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• "Towel Defence Sad Ending" by Sawsquarenoise is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• "Mission accomplished" by Eric Matyas is licensed under Soundimage Public License, https://soundimage.org
• "Stranded in the asteroid belt" by Eric Matyas is licensed under Soundimage Public License, https://soundimage.org
• "Starlights" by Dream-Protocol.
• "Purple legacy" by mold, https://opengameart.org

Sound:

• "41 Random Sound Effects" by HorrorPen, https://opengameart.org, is licensed under CC BY 3.0.

• Unicorn tang image by Blue Zoo Aquatics, https://www.bluezooaquatics.com
• Earth image by NASA.
• Paddle explosion extracted from a video on https://www.videezy.com

Game testing:

• Helle Christensen
• Robin Wulff-Nilsen
• Jakob Smith
• Evangelos Kipouridis
• Carl Zacchi Rindholt
• Klaus Zacchi Rindholt
• Mikkel Abrahamsen
• Arthur Andersen