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Introduction to Kaizen

Kaizen is an incremental idle game developed to explore Angular’s architecture and modern development practices. Built with Angular 21, it demonstrates disciplined, opinionated development with clean architecture principles.

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What is Kaizen?

Kaizen is an idle game where players progress through combat stages, earn gold and prestige cores, and purchase upgrades to enhance their character’s capabilities. The game features:
  • Real-time combat with automated attacks and skill systems
  • Character progression through stats like strength, intelligence, and endurance
  • Prestige mechanics that allow players to reset progress for permanent multipliers
  • Persistent state with automatic saving to Convex backend
  • Upgrade systems with both gold-based and prestige-based purchases

Quick start

Get the game running locally in minutes

Architecture

Understand the Angular architecture and design patterns

Services

Explore the service layer and dependency injection

State management

Learn about signals and real-time state persistence

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Project goals

Kaizen was created with specific learning objectives in mind:
1

Learning Angular

Implementing Services, Dependency Injection, Authentication, and State Management using Angular’s modern features
2

Architecture over chaos

Building clean, easy to read and refactor code wherever possible, following established patterns
3

Professional standards

Using GitFlow and Clean Code Principles for maintainable, production-ready code

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Tech stack

Kaizen leverages modern web technologies to provide a robust development experience:
  • Frontend: Angular 21 with standalone components
  • Language: TypeScript for type safety
  • BaaS: Convex for real-time database and serverless functions
  • Auth: Clerk for user authentication
  • Styling: TailwindCSS for utility-first styling
  • UI Components: PrimeNG for Angular components
Kaizen uses Angular 21’s standalone components exclusively, eliminating the need for NgModules and simplifying the component architecture.

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Key features

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Combat system

Players engage in automated combat with enemies that scale in difficulty: 
performAttack() {
  let attackAmount = this.calculateDamage();
  if (this.criticalHit()) {
    attackAmount *=
      2 + this.goldUpgradeService.getTotalEffect(UpgradeEffectType.CRITICAL_DAMAGE_BOOST);
  }
  const remainingHP = Math.max(0, Math.floor(this.enemyHP() - attackAmount));
  const defeated = remainingHP === 0;
  this.enemyHP.set(remainingHP);
  if (defeated) {
    this.handleEnemyDefeat();
  }
}

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Prestige system

When players reach stage 20 or higher, they can prestige to earn cores: 
calculatePrestigeCores() {
  if (this.characterService.character().currentStage < 20) return 0;
  const prestigeCoreGain = Math.floor(
    4 * Math.log10(this.characterService.character().currentStage)
  );
  const multiplier =
    1 + this.prestigeUgpradeService.getTotalEffect(UpgradeEffectType.MULTIPLIER_BOOST);
  return Math.floor(prestigeCoreGain * multiplier);
}

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Auto-save functionality

The game automatically saves progress every 5 minutes: 
startAutoSave() {
  this.saveIntervalID = setInterval(() => {
    this.checkAndSave();
  }, this.AUTO_SAVE_INTERVAL);

  this.checkAndSave();
}

checkAndSave() {
  const currentGameState = this.GameStateService.getState();

  if (JSON.stringify(currentGameState) !== JSON.stringify(this.lastSavedGameState)) {
    this.GameStateService.pushUpdatesToDatabase();
    this.lastSavedGameState = currentGameState;
  }
}
The auto-save system only persists state when changes are detected, reducing unnecessary database writes.

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Next steps

Ready to get started? Check out the Quick start guide to run Kaizen locally, or dive into the Architecture overview to understand how the application is structured.

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