i’ve always liked games that look simple until you start thinking about how they actually work. minesweeper was one of those. i wanted to rebuild it from scratch, then see how much further i could take it.
the first version was just the game itself. after that i started adding the things i thought would make it more interesting to come back to: an ai coach that explains safer moves, a daily challenge where everyone gets the same board, leaderboards, optional accounts, and a few small details like the cat mascot that reacts while you play.
the ai coach became my favorite part of the project. instead of simply revealing a safe tile, it looks at the current board, analyzes the surrounding constraints, and estimates the probability of every hidden cell containing a mine. when there’s a guaranteed move, it points you there. otherwise it highlights the safest option instead of leaving you to guess.
the daily challenge uses a deterministic seed generated from the current utc date, so every player gets exactly the same puzzle each day. scores are stored separately from the game itself, which means the puzzle can change every day without changing the game logic.
i also wanted the game to work without requiring an account. everything can be played locally, and signing in only unlocks leaderboards and saved scores. keeping those two experiences separate made the project much easier to test and use.
most of the work ended up going into the game logic rather than the interface. getting the board generation, first-click safety, flagging, chording, timer, ai hints, and daily challenge to all work together took a lot more iteration than i expected.
mineko started as a way to learn more about game development, but it ended up teaching me a lot about state management, algorithms, and building systems where several independent pieces all have to stay in sync.