Keysweeper

Welcome to Keysweeper, a prototype made during the week from Dec 30, 2018 to Jan 5, 2019.

In this game, you're basically just playing the old pre-installed favorite, Minesweeper, but instead of clicking on the boxes, you type the letter corresponding to the key you want to check for bombs. I chose this prototype this week because I wanted to learn about remappable controls in order to make more accessible games.

Now, this game itself doesn't involve any--quite the opposite really--but it does have a necessary ingredient: reading arbitrary input and mapping it to the correct game actions. That is, there's not a giant switch statement in the game checking for which key, but rather a very general method that figures it out then dispatches the right state changes.

If you're curious how I chose to implement the input, check out the source code below! It's a GameMaker-dependent solution, but the general idea can be applied in any environment where you can check "any key" events and then see the specific keys by some other means. If you use GameMaker, just import the objKeyListener from this project and add one to your room!