Adding some color

Adding some color to the game is quite easy. Since our game pieces use sprites that are made of string, we can simply make a mapping between a letter and a specific color. With that mapping, each piece can have its own color, and our game bursts with color.

In the previous article, we made the game almost playable. It was almost playable because we could interact with it, but the logic to remove completed lines was not there. In this article, we are going to add several types of pieces to the game and the logic that detects full lines and removes them.

In the previous article, we developed the base model for our game. In this article, we will be creating the UI for the game. The UI will use the model previously developed to make a playable game. It will not be the complete game, but having something you can use and play with enables faster feedback. We need feedback to know if the model is easy to use (it should be, because we wrote it using Test Driven Development), but we also need feedback on what’s the next functionality that we should develop. I prefer to do development in small steps and collect feedback as I go, even when I am doing it alone.

Have you ever seen the great ones do some katas? See how the master works through the code and changes it so effortlessly? It seems like magic, doesn’t it? But they are just humans like us. Whether you follow Martin Fowler, Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin or Kent Beck, you’ve probably seen some of their katas. If fact, you can find videos of them trying new techniques like we do, like seeing Kent Beck doing some TCR (test && commit || revert). It is through deliberate practice and being humble that they, and also we, can become better at what we do. We never know everything. There is always something we can learn and something we can improve. If we stop practicing and we assume we know it all, that is a good recipe to let our Ego destroy our careers and our lives.

TLDR;

Test Driven Development (TDD) and Dependency Injection, or the Dependency Inversion Principle, go hand in hand. They seem to complement themselves. Getting proficient in their use is not hard: you just have to see an example and apply it. These techniques will make your code more modular and easier to test. On top of that, your dependencies will be visible, design smells will be clearer and your test pyramid will be an actual pyramid. In this article, we will see a simple example you can build upon in your daily work.