Minesweeper

by Chris J. Shull

To run

1. open ./dist/index.html

or

1. npm install
2. npm run serve
3. open http://localhost:3000

or

1. npm install
2. npm run build
3. open ./dist/index.html

Tested on

• macOS / Safari 9.1.2 (also VoiceOver tested)
• iOS 9.3.5 (iPhone) / Safari (also VoiceOver tested)
• macOS / Chrome 52.0.2743.116
• macOS / Firefox 48.0.2

Approach:

This didn't seem like a task that begged for a big MVC framework, which intrigued me for two reasons: 1) I could try out some new (to me) build tools, and 2) I could play with some modern JS concepts that have been floating around in my head.

I started with Rollup because it looked interesting, but eventually added Gulp for non-JS related build tasks. I'm also particular to SASS and Autoprefixer so got those running too.

Runtime wise I wanted to stay very vanilla, but decided to bring in jQuery for DOM manipulation ergonomics.

While coding I set myself a few goals:

• Localizable, and RTL-ready
• Keyboard playable
• Accessible (screen reader support, proper color contrast, etc)
• Flexible layout
• Mobile support

While I started prototyping with a plain <table>, I ended up not using table layout because inner-cell layout is so persnickety. At that point Safari did not to recognize the element semantics anymore (for accessibility), so I switched to <div>s with ARIA.

Misc. notes:

• You can test RTL layout you running document.documentElement.dir = "rtl" in the JS console.

• To use the keyboard controls you can:

  • hit tab twice, or
  • click the grid labels or your first cell.

• Once the board is focused, you can press:

  • arrow keys to move around
  • enter or space to "click" a cell

• While the game currently doesn't expose the settings in the UI, the logic is not fixed to any particular dimensions or mine count.

• Instead of text color in the cells, I used used background color because I felt it was more readable.

• Using an emoji for the mine is fun, but could lead to cross-platform issues. Would likely want to replace that. (Fun fact though: VoiceOver speaks "bomb" quite nicely.)

• I love recursive reveal fades for tiled games like this. But depth-first recursion works nicely for cycle-avoidance, so I based the animation on distance from the original target.