The Brief
PROXX is a modern reimagining of Minesweeper, built in collaboration with Google Chrome Labs and launched at Google I/O 2019. The brief was deceptively simple: build a game that plays well on every web-capable device on the planet, from a high-end desktop running the latest Chrome to a feature phone with a basic browser and a hardware d-pad. The mechanics were a solved problem; the real challenge was the performance constraint, delivering a smooth, responsive game while assuming nothing about device capability, screen size or input method.
Players use PROXX as a proximity scanner to locate and flag black holes, guiding their crew safely through space. The classic Minesweeper structure of numbered proximity clues, flagging and reveals provides the foundation, executed entirely on the modern web platform. The game works across desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile browsers, on feature phones with limited JavaScript engines, with keyboard-only navigation, with screen readers and assistive technology, and with d-pad and gamepad input.
The technical approach leaned hard on web platform primitives: Preact for a minimal UI footprint, PostCSS for styling, Comlink to run game logic in web workers off the main thread so input never blocks, and Rollup to bundle everything down to the smallest possible payload. The result is a game that feels fast on hardware where fast should not be possible. PROXX is open source, with the TypeScript code on GitHub, and was built by the same team that created Squoosh.app for Google Chrome Labs. That obsession with performance on the humblest hardware still shapes how we engineer at Node.