Proxx – the Perfect Sapper Clone
I’ve never been good at Minesweeper and I think I should have been at least half my age the last time I played this game. It is difficult to make a click – everything is in order, click – dead sexy gameplay, but Google has done a remarkable job with his version with open source , Proxx .
The most interesting thing about Proxx is not that it is an updated version of the game with great graphics and animation (as much as possible in Minesweeper). That’s not why Google has spent time reviving this Windows 3.1 classic. The genius of online play is that it works with just about everything, from your smartphone to your old functional T9 phone, which is gathering dust somewhere in a drawer. Plus, the game is only 100KB in size, only needs 18KB to download before you can interact with it, and it renders at a constant 60fps.
“Smartphones like the KaiOS phones are gaining popularity rapidly. These are devices with very limited resources, but our approach to using web workers whenever we can has allowed us to make things more responsive on these phones as well. Since feature phones have a different input interface (d-pad and number keys, no touchscreen), we also implemented a key-based interface, ”writes Mariko Kosaka of Google, one of the developers on the project.
To get started, simply visit the Proxx website and select your difficulty level. You can also manually adjust the size of your mined field and specify how many black holes you want if you’re adventurous. (Black holes are “mines” that cannot be tapped.)
If you’ve lived in a cave for the past 30+ years and don’t know how to sweep, here’s a quick guide. Click the square. If this is mine,you will lose . Game over. If it is not a mine, the square is cleared. Neighboring squares are also cleared if there are no mines around them. Eventually you will see squares with numbers. This is how many mines surround the indicated square – horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.
If you think you’ve figured out where the mine is, you can switch the setting from “clear” to “flag” at the bottom and mark the potential problem on your grid. (You can also right-click to flag mines if you are playing in a browser). Flagging a mine means you won’t accidentally click on it when you switch back to “clear” and will help you keep track of what is a mine and what is not (likely). Continue clearing and marking until you explode or find all empty spots. Enjoy the everlasting disappointment of the Minesweeper game.
To learn a little more about how (and why) Google created Proxx, check out two talks at the Google I / O Developers Conference this year: