Dont Fear The Sweeper
Classic minesweeper game play with a twist, you now have the use of a bomb which will safely uncover a large area of the board. Multiple different themes, 4 difficulty levels and custom games, gives an option for everyone while fastest time score boards, game saves and replays will help you increase your skills.
Don't Fear the Sweeper was my first entry into the world of XBox Live Indie Games, starting out simply as an experiment into developing using XNA game studio and an attempt at learning C#, I decided to place DFTS on the service and see how it did. So far DFTS has sold enough copy's for me to consider it a success.
While a minesweeper game is simple enough on the surface, DFTS posed a big challange to me, I had never used C# or XNA before, let alone programmed for a console machine with limited resources (compared to my development PC). Immediatly after starting this project I fell in love with C# programming and felt right at home within the XNA framework, soon enough thinking in terms of resource management and utilizing multiple CPU's and hardware threads to keep things running smooth became second nature.
Actually having my game published and out there in the big wide world was another major milestone in my career as a games programmer, programming games that only yourself and friends will play is one thing, but releasing it poses a whole new set of challanges I had to overcome, this project taught me new debugging and polishing skills as I strived to make it the best I could.
CLICK HERE to view DFTS on the XBox marketplace and download it to your console. Please contact me if you want a free download code.
