Invanoid is mashing up two of the most iconic arcade ideas on the Amiga, and making it look completely natural. The new homebrew from developer DjPiotrs takes Arkanoid’s paddle-and-ball precision and bolts it directly onto a descending Space Invaders-style formation, turning a very simple pitch into something that feels tense almost immediately.
You control a bat sliding along the bottom of the screen, bouncing a projectile upward while alien ranks drift and fire from above. Miss too many returns or let incoming shots through and the whole structure of the wave starts to slip out of your control, forcing you to decide whether to prioritize survival or one last risky angle to clear a stubborn enemy. It’s the kind of design where you instantly understand the rules but need a few rounds to stop playing it like either Arkanoid or Space Invaders and start treating it as its own thing.
Visually, Invanoid leans into a 1950s B‑movie sci‑fi flair, layered over classic Amiga sensibilities. Under the hood, it’s built in the Scorpion Engine, which has quickly become a go-to framework for new Amiga projects, letting creators focus on level and enemy behavior instead of reinventing technical groundwork every time.
The game has been highlighted across various Amiga community channels as one of the more interesting “genre blender” experiments on the platform in the last year. It’s positioned less as a nostalgia-only curiosity and more as a small but thoughtful score-chaser that fits neatly alongside other modern Amiga releases on real hardware or setups like PiMiga. If you’re still regularly firing up an A1200 or an emulator, this is exactly the sort of focused, replayable project that earns a permanent spot in the rotation rather than just a quick test run for screenshots.
Source: Old School Gamer Magazine
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