A couple of years ago some person made an online minesweeper game where you could compete against random people from the internet. You could score points by correctly putting a flag on a bomb or opening non-bomb squares. Clicking on a bomb or misplacing a flag wouldn’t kill you. Instead you would lose some of your points. There was no win or loss condition. Just the infinite span of the field and a visible high score table to give a sense of competition.

I played it for a while because i thought the idea was neat but wasn’t super interested in putting a lot of time in it. My mom however, she enjoyed it a lot. She was playing it constantly and getting quite proficient in it. However every time when we visited she was complaining about the game being too laggy, losing scores, or being kicked out of the server. So even though she liked the game a lot. It was not really enjoyable for her and quite frustrating at times.

A couple of weeks later she told me that the game was taken of the web because the owner didn’t want pay the server costs anymore. My mom was quite sad about this so i had a look at trying to implement a similar game for her to enjoy.

My initial start was a bit haphazardly trying just a frontend implementation in react. She didn’t really care about the multiplayer aspect of the game. More the infinite aspect of it. I quickly ran into some technical difficulties and sort of gave up on the idea since i had other things i was working on at the time.

Now that i have a little more time on my hands i was thinking of giving it another go in a more structured manner.

In this blog series I’m going to record my progress, findings, obstacles and choices.