Panelbreak

A fighting game that takes place on a comic book page. The panel borders are the walls, and the way you win is to knock your opponent through one and off the page entirely.

How it plays

• Damage is not health, it is LEVERAGE. Your damage meter counts up, and the higher it goes the further the next Slam sends you. A fresh fighter slides about a hundred pixels; one at sixty per cent flies most of the way across the page. So chipping someone up is not how you win — it is how you set up the hit that does.
• Walls are broken by BODIES, not by fists. A border only takes damage when a fighter is driven into it by a Slam. A hundred jabs will never mark it, and a slam you guarded arrives too slow to matter — guarding with your back to a wall protects the wall as well as you.
• Breaking one re-lays the page out. The two panels merge, every surviving panel resizes over six tenths of a second, and the fight carries on in a different shape. A cramped brawl opens into a duel, and the player who chose which wall to break chose the next fight's shape.
• The page frame is a wall too. You cannot simply be shoved off the edge: the paper has to tear first. That is what makes the loop — build damage, smash them through a border, knock them off the page — the game rather than a decoration on it.
• Every page is generated and checked. Four to six panels in two or three tiers, one or two walls reinforced at double strength, and a solver that refuses any layout from which some panel could never reach the edge. Four hundred pages are swept in CI on every build.

Everything is printed: ben-day dot shading quantised to three levels, three colour plates screened at their own angles and deliberately a hair out of register, and heavy black ink on yellowed newsprint. Every letter in the game — the KRAKK on a slam, the round clock, the wordmark — is drawn from strokes rather than set in a font, so it wobbles like a hand and there is no font asset anywhere in the build.