In the previous articles of this series we have been building a game using Rx.js and Web Speech. We have followed, more or less, the same steps I took while I was at the JavaScript Wizardry contest at Active Solution Spring conference in Dublin.

If you have missed any of the previous articles don’t hesitate to go back and take a look from the beginning!

In this final issue we will complete our game by adding some excitement through the possibility of dying. We will also make the game more visually appealing with some styles and graphics, experiment with the Web Speech Synthesis API and we’ll wrap it up with a small reflection about the whole experience.

In the last article of the series we started building a game Rx.js and Web Speech just like I did at the JavaScript hackathon at Active Dublin 2016.

The game is a variation of the popular typing game where words fall off the screen and you need to type them before they get to you. The slight variation consists in changing the game mechanics from typing to speaking. In our game, letters will fall off the screen and the player will need to say a word starting with that letter to earn points, destroy the letter and avoid certain annihilation.

At the end of the last article we had completed the beginnings of a game with a beautiful black background and some letters falling off the screen. Let’s continue building our game by adding some player interaction through the Web Speech API!

Last week… or was it two weeks ago?… wo! Time flies!… Two weeks ago I was at Active Solution spring conference at Dublin. The topic of the conference was JavaScript (yippiii!) and we organized a hackathon for all employees to experiment with their JavaScript skills and build something cool over the weekend using music, sound or speech APIs.

It was a super fun experience and every team had something to show at the final reckoning in the demo sessions. My personal favorite (and the winner) was a virtual fly that sprang to life when you connected several devices together and started buzzing as it randomly flied through a crowded room to everyone’s delight (or almost everyone XD).

I, myself, worked as a coach during the Hackathon so I couldn’t fully participate with any team. I did sneak some hours though and attempted to build something cool with Rx.js and Web Speech.

This is the story of… Say What Maddafackaaaaaaa!! - The Game… Behold!!

The first talk about Reactive Extensions I listened to was in 2010 at a .NET conference in Sweden. Back then it looked like an awesome way to write ultra-responsive (in the fast-to-respond sense) WPF applications. I watched in awe as the speaker demonstrated how to magically orchestrate a throng of diverse asynchronous operations into one beautiful, declarative and concise set of instructions.

I watched it then, admired it and never saw it again, never used it myself, not even once. Yep… that happens sometimes :)

Fast-forward to today and it feels like Rx.js is exploding (EXPLODIIIING!!!), with frameworks like cycle.js that let you build applications right on top of Rx.js or Angular2 that has chosen Rx.js as its core async pattern.

But what is Rx.js, why is it so popular and ever so useful?

Let’s find out