UNIVERSITY OF WEST ATTICA
SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING AND INFORMATICS

University of West Attica · Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics

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Computer Programming

Minesweeper

Vasileios Evangelos Athanasiou
Student ID: 19390005

GitHub · LinkedIn

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Supervision

Supervisor: Nikolaos Vassilas, Professor

UNIWA Profile

Co-supervisor: Georgios Meletiou, Laboratory Teaching Staff

UNIWA Profile

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Athens, January 2022

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README

Minesweeper

A C-based utility that generates a Minesweeper board based on user-defined dimensions and bomb counts. The program calculates the proximity numbers for each cell and outputs the resulting board to both the console and a formatted text file.

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Table of Contents

Section	Folder/File	Description
1	INSTALL.md	Installation and setup instructions
2	README.md	Project overview and usage information
3	assign/	Assignment description and reference images
3.1	assign/Minesweeper.png	Minesweeper assignment image (English)
3.2	assign/Ναρκαλιευτής.png	Minesweeper assignment image (Greek)
4	src/	Source code and resources for the project
4.1	src/boards/	Predefined game boards for testing
4.1.1	src/boards/board10x20x20.txt	Board configuration (10x20 grid with 20 mines)
4.1.2	src/boards/board5x4x6.txt	Board configuration (5x4 grid with 6 mines)
4.2	src/minesweeper.c	Main C source code implementing the Minesweeper game

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1. Features

• Dynamic Board Generation: Allows custom rows (M), columns (N), and bomb count (K).
• Proximity Logic: Automatically calculates the number of adjacent bombs for every empty cell (8-neighbor adjacency).
• Memory Management: Uses dynamic heap allocation (calloc) with error handling and proper memory cleanup to prevent leaks.
• Dual Output:
  • Prints a formatted grid to stdout
  • Saves the board to a .txt file inside a boards/ directory using a descriptive filename (e.g., board10x10x15.txt).

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2. How It Works

2.1 Allocation

The board is created as a 2D pointer array (int**) using dynamic memory allocation.

2.2 Bomb Placement

Bombs are randomly distributed across the grid using:

• rand()
• srand(time(NULL))

Bombs are represented internally with the value:

-1

2.3 Neighbor Calculation

For each bomb placed, the program scans its 3×3 neighborhood and increments the values of surrounding non-bomb cells.

2.4 Cleanup

All dynamically allocated memory is released before program termination:

• Each allocated row is freed
• The main pointer array is freed