Sweeper
Sweeper is a project I made in the free time due to my interest in playing minesweeper myself.
Once I had the basics of minesweeper working I wanted to work on making the game “always solvable” I researched and found a solution others had suggested, essentially an “AI” calculating all the possibilities of the mine layout based on the information presented. It does this in stages by calculating the “Edge” mines of the AIs current visible area. If the calculations end up with only 1 possible way the the mines can be layed out, then they are marked as known and the others revealed. If this process reveals the entire map, then the map is solveable. This process would occasionally encounter huge amounts of combinations and stall for very large amounts of time, especially on low end mobile devices. So instead of doing this live in the actual build I now create a batch of maps of particular dimensions and then supply the map as a file. When starting the game randomly loads a map from the included files.
3D was done in much the same way just with the added dimension. This does make the “always solvable” calculation much more intensive but 3D does not need many mines or a large size to become quite complex to solve. Like 2D, map files are included in the build which are loaded on start of play.
PC Version
This build is made to work, and has been tested on, windows 10 and 11.
Controls are :
Left click to remove a block (a bomb will blow if it is removed.).
Right click to mark a block as a mine.
(3D Mode only) Hold left click and move to rotate the map to see different perspectives.
VR Version
The download contains two builds, a PC exe for windows and to work with the old Oculus Rift PC headsets.
And an APK to be installed to a meta Quest 2/3.
The VR version only has 3D, but does have 3 difficulties, but I am told the “easy” is still quite difficult.
Controls are :
You can interact with locks by putting your controller in them.
Left controller trigger is to mark mines.
Holding the Left controller grip rotates the whole map.
Right controller trigger is to remove blocks.
Holding the Right controller grip moves the whole map.
Android Phone Version
This build is made to work on android phones, and has been tested on a OnePlus 12R.
Controls are :
Tap to remove a block (a bomb will blow if it is removed.).
Hold to mark a block as a mine.
(3D Mode only) Drag to rotate the map to see different perspectives.