What is this?

This is a procedurally generated Minesweeper game written in Haskell using the Reflex-DOM framework.

Instead of placing mines at the beginning of the game all cells start out with an undefined state. Only when the player clicks on a cell to reveal it the state of it and all surrounding cells will be fixed to either contain a mine or be safe.

This way the distribution of the mines on the board depends on the actions of the player and in which order the cells are revealed.

Using GHCJS this project can be transpiled to JavaScript and be deployed as a static web app.

It can also be built with GHC producting a native executable using WebkitGtk as a browser.

You can play a live demo of this project here.

Context

This project was made for a univerity course on advanced functional programming.

It was inspired by and heavily based on

• Kaboom - a cruel, but fair Minesweeper game by Paweł Marczewski (pwmarcz.pl)

The files in the css/ directory are copied directly from Kaboom.

How to install and build

Cloning from GitHub

Download the code with git clone from GitHub:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/acran/haboom.git

Using nix

The reflex framework recommends using the Nix package manager.

With nix already installed all required dependencies and compilers can be download with the try-reflex script included in the reflex-platform directory:

# install all dependencies and enter reflex sandbox
reflex-platform/try-reflex

# in the reflex sandbox build with ghc/ghcjs

ghcjs Main.hs # build as static web app
cp -r css/ Main.jsexe/ # add static assets to build result
# open Main.jsexe/index.html with a browser

ghc Main.hs # build as native executable
./Main # start executable

On the first run of try-reflex about 14GB of dependencies will be downloaded. For more information see the reflex-platform documentation.

Using docker

If you just want to build the project you can also use the included Dockerfile to execute the above steps in a docker container:

# build image with name 'haboom'
docker build -t haboom .
# build with ghcjs in a container named 'haboom'
docker run --name haboom haboom ghcjs Main.hs
# copy build product from container
docker cp haboom:/haboom/Main.jsexe ./Main.jsexe

cp -r css/ Main.jsexe/ # add static assets to build result
# open Main.jsexe/index.html with a browser

When the build seems to hang because the output has stopped just be patient and wait until the build finishes.

Building the documentation

You can use haddock to build a browsable source code documentation:

haddock --odir=docs --html --pretty-html Main.hs Game/*.hs Gui/*.hs

# or using the docker image
docker run --name haboom haboom haddock --odir=docs --html --pretty-html Main.hs Game/*.hs Gui/*.hs
docker cp haboom:/haboom/docs/ docs

# open docs/index.html with a browser

You can find an online version of the documentation here.

Known issues

• The game is not guaranteed to be solvable without guessing, and if the player is forced to guess it is not guaranteed to be safe - unlike with Kaboom!
• The placement algorithm is actually really crude. It was first implemented as a placeholder but incidentally worked out quite good for small field sizes with few mines. For bigger field sizes and many mines unfortunately the mines end up in one big cluster most of the times.
• The performance is not very optimized and results in noticable delays with bigger field sizes.