Interactive Poster

Created for UCSC ARTG80G

An Interactive Poster for the Game Minesweeper

Walkthrough: https://youtu.be/03h5q_gTRe8

The artistic goals of this project were two-fold. The first goal was creating a miniature demo of Minesweeper, as a way to advertise the game itself. The second was to over dramatize the sense of tension that Minesweeper rarely conjures.

    For recreating Minesweeper, I wanted to expand on my previous game poster, where a game of Minesweeper’s flags were replaced with letters spelling out the title. I decided to make my own font to better capture the look of the game’s flags. Letters were constructed with a focus on straight lines, a triangular taper on their top right, and a bezeled aesthetic to make them feel clickable. The mechanics of Minesweeper itself took lots of trial and error. Eventually I settled on an array of “Box” objects with a clicked state. When unclicked, they would render two rectangles to look like a slightly protruding button. Once clicked, they would render a character from the array given to them, matching their place in the Box array. Additionally, numbers were not entered as characters in the list, so that they could be algorithmically colored instead of manually.

    For tension, several changes occurred as the subject clicked more tiles. The color of the background and tiles tints more and more red as more buttons are clicked. Additionally a threatening whir starts to play in the background, increasing in volume as more buttons are pressed. Text scrolls on top of the screen from a third character, to set a mood of potential danger. Clicking on a mine stops all other sound and plays an explosion with the screen flashing red and slowly fading back to normal. Clicking on all non-mines causes the color to fade back from red and the hum to lower in volume until muted. Both of these endings are meant to release any built up tension.

    I’m thankful I had the good sense to, early on, declare a handful of universal variables, as it made formatting changes SIGNIFICANTLY easier to do. The hardest technical issue was having the buttons work properly. Having them respond to clicking, only make noise when clickable, and having them render text properly and at the right time all posed technical hurdles. An early build allowed players to click on the same button repeatedly (although only a number was rendered and not a rectangle) until the game decided the player had won. Getting the buttons themselves glitch-free took the most time and is easily the part I am most proud of.