Achtung Minen! is my first stand-alone game project. It's based on the classic game Minesweeper, and falls into a category somewhere between a puzzle game and real-time strategy. Achtung Minen! is a competitive multiplayer game in which two players have the simple objective of navigating to the enemy's base in order to capture it. The catch, of course, is the deadly mine field they have to cross. Like in Minesweeper captured safe squares display a number, indicating the number of adjacent mines. However squares must be captured sequentially - there must always be a clear path linking back to your base. In addition to deadly deadly mines of death (and time penalties), the minefield is littered with barbed wire and supply crates. Barbed wire must be removed with wire cutters before the square can be captured, and supply crates give helpful items, which can be used to gain a strategic advantage over the enemy.

It's only in the early stages of development, but a lot of the game functionality is now in place. Achtung Minen! will be playable online (networking programming from the ground up to something that's new to me, so I expect this to take a while) or by two players at the same computer. I'm also more and more tempted to add a Player Vs Computer mode, but this will come later on. Graphics and GUI are high up on the to-do list, as it currently looks rather like some early 90s cover CD shareware...

Achtung Minen! will be free to download and play, and will be available for Windows, Mac and (hopefully) Linux.

Mine field generation, in 2D:


[spoiler][/spoiler]

Early ingame view:
[spoiler][/spoiler]

A little bit of basic playtesting:

I'll be honest, I have no idea whats going on but it looks really interesting.

I would look forward to playing that!

Thought I'd post this here, since it's relevant:

I've been working on the graphical capabilities of the engine which I'll be using for this project and future projects. I'm using a pre-pass lighting technique for the renderer, using fully dynamic lighting. Considering I had practically zero knowledge of graphics programming not all that long ago, I think it's beginning to look rather good.



I believe the UV coordinates from the floor and ceiling textures are inverted which means the normal maps, but that was an issue with creating the model, not with the renderer. The walls and objects are correct though. Each small sphere represents a point light.