I thought about making a new version of Minesweeper Madness after losing the project files for the prototype. I finally got around to it and now Minesweeper Madness is back and better than ever.
Although I couldn’t play the original anymore, I kept in mind the areas I marked as having “ample room for improvement” in the post for the prototype. I addressed them as follows:
- I used free assets from the Asset Store to make the game aesthetically nicer. Terrain is generated on the fly, and this includes generating invisible walls to constrain the player to the area of the board.
- Mine generation is still completely random, but the tile the player starts on is guaranteed to not be a mine.
- I rethought the logic and design choices behind flagging mines; now the button changes color, which eliminates the possibility of the bug in the original version.
- The minesweeper is now composed of primitives, and even has a rudimentary walking animation.
- I brushed up on how the UI system works and the elements no longer collide. The UI animations are not always consistent but I’m fairly certain that’s a problem on the engine side.
- There are now sounds.
- I used a free font, “FFF Forward,” to make the UI and title stylistically consistent.
Other notes on this project:
- Instead of merely jumping up and down when the player wins a game, the character now rockets into the sky while smiling emoticons stream from their body. Truly an improvement.
- In retrospect, while 16×16 and 30×16 are reasonable for regular Minesweeper, they seem ludicrously large in this format. Perhaps a different choice of board size would be more appropriate.
- The main menu background is now an in-game scene rendered with a camera. The terrain in the background is a low-poly mesh of rolling hills, while the terrain in the game scene is a flat plane. If I had time I’d write a simple terrain generation script, but it would be a little tricky to implement and wouldn’t add much as players are more focused on the board than on the surroundings.
This game still keeps the fun of the original prototype, but is more polished and cohesive in presentation. I don’t think I’ll revisit Minesweeper Madness unless I do something completely new with it, but who knows?