A childhood memory Tetris game built with Angular 10 and Akita

Working Game

Check out the working game -> https://tetris.trungk18.com

The game has sounds, wear your 🎧 or turn on your 🔊 for a better experience.

If you like my work, feel free to:

• Tweet about Angular Tetris
• ⭐ this repository. And we will be happy together :)
• 

Thanks a bunch for stopping by and supporting me!

The mobile device support is very limited at the moment - can play but tapping multiple times will be an issue, no button press effect. I will spend the next few days working on it. The screenshot below recorded on iPhone X. Please tweet and tag me for any issues that you are currently facing!!

Thanks for your understanding. Stay tuned!

Why?

Tetris was the first game that my dad bought for me and It cost about 1$ US at that time. It didn’t sound a lot today. But 20 years ago, 1$ can feed my family for at least a few days. Put it that way, with 1$ you can buy two dozens eggs. This is the only gaming “machine” that I ever had until my first computer arrived. I have never had a SNES or PS1 at home.

My Tetris was exactly in the same yellow color and it was so big, running on 2 AA battery. It is how it looks.

After showing my wife the Tetris game built with Vue. She asked me why I didn’t build the same Tetris with Angular? And here you go.

The game can hold up to a maximum score of 999999 (one million minus one 😂) and I have never reached that very end.

Please tweet the screenshot with your highest score, together with hashtag #angulartetris and my name tagged as well @trungvose. I will send a free gift to the one having the highest score of the day, from now till 1 Aug 2020.

Who is this for?

I built this game dedicated to:

• For anyone that grew up with Tetris as a part of your memory. It was my childhood memory and I hope you enjoy the game as well.
• For the Angular developer community, I have never really seen a game that built with Angular and that’s my answer. Using Akita as the underlying state management helps me to see all of the data flow, it is great for debugging. I wanted to see more Angular game from you guys 💪💪💪

How to play

Before playing

• You can use both keyboard and mouse to play. But prefer to use keyboard
• Press arrow left and right to change the speed of the game (1 - 6). The higher the number, the faster the piece will fall
• Press arrow up and down to change how many of lines have been filled before starting the game (1 - 10)
• Press Space to start the game
• Press P for pause/resume game
• Press R for resetting the game
• Press S for the turn on/off the sounds

Playing game

• Press Space make the piece drop quickly
• Press Arrow left and right for moving left and right
• Press Arrow up to rotate the piece
• Press Arrow down to move a piece faster
• When clearing lines, you will receive a point - 100 points for 1 line, 300 points for 2 lines, 700 points for 3 lines, 1500 points for 4 lines
• The drop speed of the pieces increases with the number of rows eliminated (one level up for every 20 lines cleared)

Techstack

I built it barely with Angular and Akita, no additional UI framework/library was required.

Development Challenge

I got the inspiration from the same but different Tetris game built with Vue. To not reinvented the wheel, I started to look at Vue code and thought it would be very identical to Angular. But later one, I realized a few catches:

• The Vue source code was written a few years ago with pure JS. I could find several problems that the compiler didn’t tell you. Such as giving parseInt a number. It is still working though, but I don’t like it.
• There was extensive use of setTimeout and setInterval for making animations. I rewrote all of the animation logic using RxJS. You will see the detail below.
• The brain of the game also used setTimeout for the game loop. It was not a problem, but I was having a hard time understanding the code on some essential elements: how to render the piece to the UI, how the calculation makes sense with XY axis. In the end, I changed all of the logic to a proper OOP way using TypeScript class, based on @chrum/ngx-tetris.

Tetris Core

It is the most important part of the game. As I am following the Vue source code, It is getting harder to understand what was the developer’s intention. The Vue version inspired me but I think I have to write the core Tetris differently.

Take a look at the two blocks of code below which do the same rendering piece on the screen and you will understand what I am talking about. The left side was rewritten with Angular and TypeScript and the right side was the JS version.

I always think that your code must be written as you talk to people, without explaining a word. Otherwise, when someone comes in and reads your code and maintains it, they will be struggling.

“ Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad.” – Cory House

And let me emphasize it again, I didn’t write the brain of the game from scratch. I adapted the well-written source by @chrum/ngx-tetris for Tetris core. I did refactor some parts to support Akita and wrote some new functionality as well.

Akita state management + Dev tool support

Although you don’t dispatch any action, Akita will still do it undo the hood as the Update action. And you still can see the data with Redux DevTools. Remember to put that option into your AppModule

imports: [environment.production ? [] : AkitaNgDevtools.forRoot()]

I turn it on all the time on tetris.trungk18.com, you can open the DevTools and start seeing the data flow.

Note: opening the DevTools could reduce the performance of the game significantly. I recommended you turn it off when you want to archive a high score 🤓

Customizing Piece

I defined a base Piece class for a piece. And for each type of piece, it will extend from the same base class to inherit the same capability

export class Piece {
  x: number
  y: number
  rotation = PieceRotation.Deg0
  type: PieceTypes
  shape: Shape
  next: Shape

  private _shapes: Shapes
  private _lastConfig: Partial<Piece>

  constructor(x: number, y: number) {
    this.x = x
    this.y = y
  }

  store(): Piece {
    this._lastConfig = {
      x: this.x,
      y: this.y,
      rotation: this.rotation,
      shape: this.shape,
    }
    return this._newPiece()
  }

  //code removed for brevity
}

For example, I have a piece L. I create a new class name PieceL. I will contain the shape of L in four different rotation so that I don’t have to mess up with the math to do minus plus on the XY axis. And I think defining in that way makes the code self-express better. If you see 1, it means on the matrix it will be filled, 0 mean empty tile.

If my team member needs to maintain the code, I hope he will understand what I was trying to write immediately. Or maybe not 🤣

One import property of the Piece is the next property to display the piece shape on the decoration box for the upcoming piece.

const ShapesL: Shapes = [];
ShapesL[PieceRotation.Deg0] = [
  [0, 0, 0, 0],
  [1, 0, 0, 0],
  [1, 0, 0, 0],
  [1, 1, 0, 0]
];

ShapesL[PieceRotation.Deg90] = [
  [0, 0, 0, 0],
  [0, 0, 0, 0],
  [1, 1, 1, 0],
  [1, 0, 0, 0]
];
//code removed for brevity

];

export class PieceL extends Piece {
  constructor(x: number, y: number) {
    super(x, y);
    this.type = PieceTypes.L;
    this.next = [
      [0, 0, 1, 0],
      [1, 1, 1, 0]
    ];
    this.setShapes(ShapesL);
  }
}

Now is the interesting part, you create a custom piece by yourself. Simply create a new class that extends from Piece with different rotations.

For instance, I will define a new piece call F with class name PieceF. That is how it should look like.

const ShapesF: Shapes = []
ShapesF[PieceRotation.Deg0] = [
  [1, 0, 0, 0],
  [1, 1, 0, 0],
  [1, 0, 0, 0],
  [1, 1, 0, 0],
]

export class PieceF extends Piece {
  constructor(x, y) {
    super(x, y)
    this.type = PieceTypes.F
    this.next = [
      [1, 0, 1, 0],
      [1, 1, 1, 1],
    ]
    this.setShapes(ShapesF)
  }
}

And the last step, go to PieceFactory to add the new PieceF into the available pieces.

export class PieceFactory {
  private _available: typeof Piece[] = []

  constructor() {
    //code removed for brevity
    this._available.push(PieceF)
  }
}

And you’re all set, this is the result. See how easy it is to understand the code and add a custom piece that you like.

The source code for that custom piece F, you can see at feature/pieceF branch.

Animation

I rewrote the animation with RxJS. See the comparison below for the simple dinosaurs running animation at the beginning of the game.

You could do a lot of stuff if you know RxJS well enough :) I think I need to strengthen my RxJS knowledge soon enough as well. Super powerful.

The actual result doesn’t look very identical but it is good enough in my standard.

Web Audio API

There are many sound effects in the game such as when you press space, or left, right. In reality, all of the sounds were a reference to a single file assets/tetris-sound.mp3.

I don’t have much experience working with audio before but the Web Audio API looks very promising. You could do more with it.

• See the official documentation
• See how I load the mp3 file and store it in sound-manager.service.ts
• Writing Web Audio API code that works in every browser

Keyboard handling

I planned to use @ngneat/hotkeys but I decided to use @HostListener instead. A simple implementation could look like:

@HostListener(`${KeyDown}.${TetrisKeyboard.Left}`)
keyDownLeft() {
  this._soundManager.move();
  this._keyboardService.setKeỵ({
    left: true
  });
  if (this.hasCurrent) {
    this._tetrisService.moveLeft();
  } else {
    this._tetrisService.decreaseLevel();
  }
}

See more at containers/angular-tetris/angular-tetris.component.ts

Features and Roadmap

Phase 1 - Angular Tetris basic functionality

July 10 - 23, 2020

• Proven, scalable, and easy to understand project structure
• Basic Tetris functionality
• Six levels
• Local storage high score
• Sounds effects
• Limited mobile support

Phase 2 - Firebase high score, service worker, more sounds effect, more animation

TBD

• Fully mobile support
• Offline mode (play without internet connection)
• Firebase high score
• More sound effects
• More animations

Time spending

I was still working with Chau Tran on phase two of Angular Jira clone when I saw that Tetris game built with Vue. My wife wanted to have a version that I built so that I decided to finish the Angular Tetris first before completing Jira clone phase two.

According to waka time report, I have spent about 30 hours working on this project. Which is equal to run a marathon five times at my current speed 😩

The flow was easy. I designed a simple to do list, then start reading the code in Vue. And start working on the Angular at the same time. Halfway, I start to read @chrum/ngx-tetris instead of the Vue source. I kept coding until I have the final result. 30 hours was a good number. It would take me longer, or lesser. But I enjoyed the experience working on the first-ever game I have built.

Setting up development environment 🛠

• git clone https://github.com/trungvose/angular-tetris.git
• cd angular-tetris
• npm start
• The app should run on http://localhost:4200/

Author: Trung Vo ✍️

• A young and passionate front-end engineer. Working with Angular and TypeScript. Like photography, running, cooking, and reading books.
• Author of Angular Jira clone -> jira.trungk18.com
• Personal blog: https://trungk18.com/
• Say hello: trungk18 [et] gmail [dot] com

Credits and references

Contributing

If you have any ideas, just open an issue and tell me what you think.

If you’d like to contribute, please fork the repository and make changes as you’d like. Pull requests are warmly welcome.

License

Feel free to use my code on your project. It would be great if you put a reference to this repository.

MIT