The first question people ask when they hear we're making Minesweeper is "why?" It's a 30-year-old game. You can find a version in any browser tab. The market is saturated.
We get it. But the question contains a misunderstanding about what we're actually doing.
We're not making Minesweeper
We're making a game with Minesweeper's rules. That's a completely different thing. The rules of Minesweeper — reveal, flag, don't hit a mine — are a solved problem. Nobody is confused about how Minesweeper works. That frees us to focus entirely on the questions that actually interest us: how does this game feel? What does it communicate about the studio that made it? Why would someone choose our version over the ten other ones on the Play Store?
Those are design questions. And design is our differentiator.
Classics are canvas, not constraint
When you build a new IP, you're solving two problems simultaneously: inventing the game and polishing the game. The invention problem is enormous — systems design, balance, novel mechanics, first-time user experience for rules nobody knows yet. For a small team, it's a lot to carry.
A classic game gives you the ruleset for free. All you have to do is make it beautiful.
That sounds limiting. It isn't. The constraint is where creativity happens. With the game design solved, every decision we make is about craft: the font, the transition timing, the way tiles feel under your thumb, the color palette at midnight in dark mode. We get to care obsessively about the things most game studios treat as afterthoughts.
The differentiator is obvious if you're honest
Most Minesweeper apps on the Play Store were built by one person over a weekend and never touched again. That's not a criticism — it's an opportunity. The bar for "good" in this category is genuinely low.
We wanted to make the version that a designer would choose. Not because of features — most feature lists for Minesweeper apps are identical — but because of how it feels. The animation on tile reveal. The way the number color scales with its value. The satisfaction of a flag landing exactly where you tapped it. The score screen that makes a good run feel like an achievement worth keeping.
Design details like these are not expensive to build. They are expensive to care about. Most people don't. We do.
What comes next
The third game won't be a classic in the same sense. But the approach carries forward: pick a space where the competition is winning on features alone, and beat them on craft. There's almost always room to do that.
We're not making the most games. We're making games worth getting lost in. That's a different bet — and one we're willing to make.
The untitled project is different. Watch the journal.