Leadlight - Stained-Glass Brick-Breaker Minigame for RPG Maker MZ: Break the Pane, Win the Picture

Break the glass, win the picture.

Leadlight is a brick-breaker minigame for RPG Maker MZ. Name any picture in your project and the plugin cuts a stained-glass pane from that picture: every piece of glass is the picture itself, coloured as glass would colour it and set in lead. Keep the ball in play with the lead bar, break the pane piece by piece, and the true picture shows through. Break the target share and the rest of the pane falls away, and the picture is shown whole in a gilt frame.

Nothing is loaded but your picture. The glass, the lead, the bar, the ball, the shards and the frame are all drawn by the plugin, so a CG, a portrait, a map screenshot or a title image becomes a minigame with one plugin command.

---

⚠️ Compatibility — the question you actually have

Tested against RPG Maker MZ with the stock scripts unmodified, verified by running the plugin in the real engine rather than only in tests.

Plugin Manager order:

1. LeadlightCore.js — Leadlight 1/3 - the rules: a brick-breaker over a pane read from your picture. No engine code.
2. LeadlightDraw.js — Leadlight 2/3 - the look: stained-glass panes generated from your picture, shards, the lead bar, the window frame. No engine code.
3. Leadlight.js — Leadlight 3/3 - break a stained-glass pane generated from one of your pictures to reveal it: a brick-breaker minigame.

Core methods extended — 2 by saved-original prototype extension, none replaced: Game_System.prototype.initialize, Game_Interpreter.prototype.updateWaitMode.

Because nothing is clobbered, Leadlight co-exists with other plugins that patch the same seams, including large suites.

What is in it

• Four panes from any picture: leaded (bright simplified glass, each piece its own colour), cathedral (deep jewel glass in heavy lead with painted roundels), frost (the picture pale behind ice, so every broken piece shows clear) and brick (a wall in the picture's own colours, laid in a stagger).
• The picture decides how tough the glass is. The busiest parts of your picture (an edge, a face, a line of text) make the toughest pieces: a tenth take three hits, a quarter take two. A tough piece cracks first, and you see the crack.
• Power-ups: about one piece in ten drops a medallion. Wide makes the bar half as wide again for 15 seconds, Multi adds two more balls, Slow slows the balls for 10 seconds.
• Results go back into your game: seconds taken, balls lost and percent broken into your variables, and a switch that says whether the pane was cleared. The event waits while the game is on screen.
• A seed gives the same pane, powers and serves every time, or leave it blank for a new game each time.
• Keys, mouse and touch: left and right move the bar, OK serves; the bar follows the pointer, a click or tap serves.
• Any screen size: laid out for 816 x 624 and scaled to fit, tested at 1280 x 720, 1104 x 624 and 640 x 480.

Measured, not promised

• With three balls breaking cathedral glass the scene draws in 5 draw calls per frame with no MZ window drawn; a piece of glass is redrawn only when it cracks or breaks.
• Your picture is read once when a game starts and never during play.
• Over 100 simulated games per row and two seeds with the default pane, a player who meets the ball well clears it in a median of about two minutes.
• Tested in the real MZ engine: any load order, a missing sibling file, a missing picture, a 1 x 1 picture, a 4000 x 3000 picture, a fully transparent picture, input spam and hostile command arguments.

Install

Copy the three files into js/plugins, turn them on in the Plugin Manager, and call the plugin command Start Leadlight with a picture. The Readme in the download covers every argument, the script call and the save record.

More from Core Systems Asset Factory

• Unveil: the same prize with another verb, a territory-capture minigame that reveals one of your pictures piece by piece.
• Jigsaw: any picture in your project cut into a generated jigsaw, every cut a real knob-and-socket curve.
• Pendant: spot the difference on any picture, with the differences generated by the plugin.
• Smithereens: pots, crates, rocks and crystals that burst into drawn pieces when the player strikes them.

AI disclosure: the code was written with AI assistance, and the store images and cover were produced with AI assistance. The plugin contains no audio; its default sounds are files from RPG Maker MZ's own RTP.