Breakout!

Weapons of choice: Flash & PhotoShop CS5, AS3

So how do I break out of a breakout? It's a bit harder than I thought. I have to keep this game in line with my epic RPG, but how? I did the first thing I always do when starting a new project: research. I try as many breakout games as I can find. Commercial ones, free casual ones and ones made by the gaming community.

My findings: it's really really hard to find a good breakout game. Some good points are: having more challenges than getting rid of all the pieces on the board and adding bonuses that change the mechanics.

Awakening
The title is called Awakening because you are awaking the hidden knowledge inside this temple and at the end of it, one party member will activate a latent special ability (although you'll not see this or even know there's a party there).

Backstory
During the adventures of Sanctuary, our adventurers come across ruined temples in search for answers to the crisis happening in their world. One temple has a door that can not be opened unless you obtain three special runes that are neatly placed on the wall beside it. The catch is that you can't just grab them. They are slightly out of phase with reality and must be activated before they are collected.

Mechanics
Balls of energy (blocks) - Each ball released will send down a positivity or negatively charged ball of energy. If a ball is collected by the paddle, one of three random events will happen. If a positive charge is collected, a good thing will happen and likewise if a negative ball is collected something not very desirable will happen.
Paddle - will be controlled by the left and right arrow keys. It will start out with a ball of energy on it's surface and will be released by the up arrow.
Runes - Each rune will be sitting on a shelf. Each shelf must be hit to activate the rune. Once hit with the ball after it is activated it can now be collected. Once each rune is collected the game is over, even though there may be blocks still left on the board.
Score - the score will be kept track of by a dynamic text box and mostly hidden. When the score changes, it glows for a few seconds, taking on the behavior of the blocks.
Lives - lives will be taken care of similar to the score.

Graphics

This is my weakest point in game creation (and the hardest I'm working on). For this game I will create all custom graphics from PhotoShop. Since this is a ruined ancient temple, I decided to make the background a wall. This wall was created using nothing but PhotoShop filters. I left the purple tone in it because well, this is not an ordinary temple and wanted to convey more than just a mundane ruined wall. It could be the minerals or crystals inherent in the rock.

Originally I was going to let this be the background to place my objects but quickly realized no matter what I put on it, my objects were washed out due to to varied texture and colors this wall has. My solution was to use the opening frame's overlay which is just a black rectangle shape with transparency. This way you still see the wall behind it, but it forces the user to focus on the important stuff.