Swords and Software

About Minesweeper 2

A New Beginning

Two years after the first Minesweeper attempt, I had just finished my first year in the BSc IT degree. This certainly didn't make me an excellent programmer, but it gave me a few skills that I found handy in rewriting Minesweeper. By that time I had forgotten the SDL API, and didn't want to make Minesweeper 2 dependent on DinoLib as I did with the first Minesweeper, so I took some time to read Lazy Foo's SDL tutorial to refresh my memory.

Although I decided not to use the same code I had used two years earlier, a lot of the concepts remained the same and so I found it very easy to replicate the original functionality with less and better code. I began Minesweeper 2 on 26th September 2006 and, within a week, I wrote the game completely. In the remake I managed to implement all the features I wanted to implement, and that I didn't manage to implement in the first game. I also made a lot of aesthetic additions, bringing Minesweeper 2 closer in functionality to the Microsoft Minesweeper on which it is based.

I also had other plans. The main game was considered finished as soon as I implemented all the core features I wanted it to have. However, I also planned on adding other things such as menus and a high score list as a side project. I had just begun work on menus when I stopped working on Minesweeper 2 due to personal reasons.