Breakout1.lvl is as follows:

For an efficiently performance game, you shouldn't been reading from a file during the "action".

Just before the stage starts, cache all of its data into arrays. Reading from memory is galaxies speedier! 

thanks for the response!
So i would perform that in the void setup?

If you wanna read all of the available .lvl files at once; yea, within setup()!

However, if you prefer to read a specific .lvl for each stage just before starting one,
you make a separate function for it, which is called within draw().

Of course, you'd need a "flag" variable to store the state your program currently is!

Okay that makes sense, at the moment i only have one .lvl anyway, but i'm really struggling at the moment with how to store the variables to an array if i'm honest, and then how to for ALL bricks on screen create the if statements for creating a collision, hmmm going to be a late night of working on it for me, I'm pretty terrible at this stuff!

Note: loadStrings() is easier to use than createReader and its loop, particularly for such small files!
As said, use it in setup(), and put the result in a global variable (defined before setup()) to be able to access the result in draw().

" I'm having a little trouble working with the arraylist"
I don't see an ArrayList in the code you shown... Don't hesitate to show the various states of your code here, it is still short enough to be pasted in the messages.
Trick: Ctrl+T (or Edit > Auto Format menu) can help us in reading your code...

1. 
   

So that's my up to date code, array lists are actually quite new to me, i'm not 100% on what i should be going about! Thank you for the suggestion but we were given the reader code for this particular assignment so i think it's probably best if i just stick to those guns!

EDIT: okay got the array list to load the data, and i can now draw rectangles from the loaded arraylist. THANK YOU FOR ANY HELP! :)

Well, it's nice you're trying to learn Collections such as the ArrayList!
They are more appropriate when the number of items is undetermined or annoying to find out.

Such as the case for the number of bricks! Since it's inside your stage template files,
which need to be read line by line; and each line gonna render some ? # of bricks of diff. types.

To know the current # of items a List currently has,
just use method size() instead of field length used by regular Arrays.

You don't create another class for collision!
You simply check the ball against each brick area every time it moves!

That's one of the reasons you need at least 4 fields in your class brick:

• Location    -> x, y
• Dimension -> w, h

Well, besides field variables, classes can have their own methods!
I guess you already know that each new instance of a class,
creates a new set of independent copies of each of its fields.

Let's say you have 8 instances of brick, whose references are stored inside ArrayList data.
Then, you'll have 8 independent copies of fields -> x, y, wid, hei.

If you create a method ( let's call it checkBrick() ) inside class brick to deal w/ collision check,
when it refers to fields x, y, wid, hei; it's gonna use its own individual copy for each of them.

So, data.get(3).checkBrick() would check if the ball is within the 4th brick's area!

Ohhh sounds interesting, so would i need to create  that within brick() or just call it within brick()?

You have to check each brick, so it has to be inside a loop.
You can use the same loop you're using to render each brick to also check whether the ball is within it!

Scrap that again, i've got it working without the thresholds, however as soon as i add data.remove(i) i run into all sorts of troubles. to begin with it doesn't bounce anymore (even though the *-1 is before the data.remove) and it sometimes gets an outofbounds exception when removing blocks

To be able to remove an item from an ArrayList in the middle of a loop,
it gotta be a backwards loop; or you gotta provide an Iterator!