Release of Minesweeper SBGG

I finally reached a release version of my little Minesweeper. It was a longer journey than I thought, as I encountered challenges I didn't expect or simply changed my mind about certain decisions. But as itchio has its own category for that, this will be the topic of my next dev log post.

So, just another Minesweeper clone? Well, you could say so, but don't dismiss it that fast. I wanted to test the boundaries here and therefore, if you ever felt limited by the field size of Minesweeper, you will not be disappointed here. You can create a 1x2 level with just one mine or create a 32'000x32'000 with 184'320'000 mines which will take many years of playtime (not lifetime) to solve.

Of course, you might get bored after just one month being stuck on just one level, therefore I added the feature, that you can put an image in the background, which is covered by the game. So to see it completely you have to solve the level, just as a small motivation. One picture can get boring with the time as well, which is why I also added a mode, that you can choose a folder where a random image is picked.

But with levels that big, you can easily get lost, so there is a mini map you can use, to see your progress or to jump to a certain position. Another issue will be, that you might want to continue later, therefore there is a save and load option.

Furthermore, as I play myself quite much Minesweeper (more than 200h in total), this game has many quality of life features. Mine number colors will show you, if you marked the exact amount or too many. You can also use them to execute actions faster, like marking all remaining fields or questioning them. You can jump to the next undiscovered field in the vicinity. The game can auto-pause if you switch to another window. It can also auto-save when you close the game and will autoload it if you open it again. You can almost hide everything of the UI to only see the field. And the list goes on. As I didn't make a change list on the side, I will probably forget some of the many things I added with the time.

Something I get easily lost, is making something very high configurable. Do you miss your language? Just create your own translation. You don't like my wording or find a typo that annoys you? Just change the file. You are color-blind or dislike my choice of colors? Create your own design. You are a left-handed person? Just adjust the controls as you like. And so on.

If you ever feel like something is missing, be it a new feature or something configurable, just open a topic in the community board of the game and I will see what I can do. There are also some hidden features which just have no UI yet, so it might even be already implemented.

Finally, I will tell you what SBGG stands for. Small background game. It is small, as I focus on the logic and don't take care of textures or audio files. As a result, the project size is tiny. I played Minesweeper often on the side, while listening to a podcast or watching a video. Hence, the missing audio is not an issue for me, as I anyway would disable it.

The background game part means that it shall not take too many resources. I did only a short check on the used resources, as the game rarely makes use of the full FPS. But the check showed even on full fps it is just like watching a video resource wise. If you don't do anything, the CPU and GPU should go to 0%, as the game has nearly nothing to do then. Moreover, the max size is limited to 1'024'000'000 as one field is one byte and windows process should have a limit of 2 GB of RAM. So even with max field size, your RAM should be just a bit above 1 GB. If you try it out, you will see that the task manager will say it is less than 100 MB RAM (depending on what you did after the start) don't get fooled by that. The task manager is not very accurate, and also the needed RAM is not reserved from the start, you would have to go over the whole level to really see the true value. So in conclusion, as long as you can start the game and your GPU is accessible for me, you should have no issue running it. I have a dying small laptop, and even he handles it very well.

That was more text than I expected. I hope I could convince you, to give it a shot. Have fun playing!