Here's my walkthrough (game v1.1.18), with which max clears are easy. Intense spoiler heavy (will spoil the game, probably will only want to read after completing everything yourself):
- What I love about this game is that it is like a mini-version in the spirit of FTL and Into the Breach. "The game is to learn the game." So below is what I have learned about it. With the walkthrough below, the joy of discovering the game might be taken away (at least if I had read this before playing, I would feel having lost something), so read at your own peril.
- Overall, fantastic game! I wish for a harder New Game+ mode with new monsters and patterns that one could attempt after completing a regular board, where one would really have to pause to make only the most calculated moves.
- You've probably learned all the monsters RPG patterns, many comments about those already. Knowing about the monsters is not really needed to get a max clear (but of course makes the game much easier). I did my first max score before picking up on that the board was not random.
- From the start, easy way to get past the first "missing XP to level up" hill is to explore immediately towards the egg. It is semi-easily locatable free +3xp, and helps avoid using a heart scroll at early game.
- Whenever board permits, speculate the play direction towards where the wizard's lair could lie. Since it is kind of big with its 2x3 cell pattern and always on the edge, its location is quite constrained. After finding the edge/corner, sniping the wizard is super beneficial for uncovering information, since it reveals the 2x3 cell and P5 enemies. Makes ruling out rat king easier as well.
- Plan so you never need to bash the walls (+1/3 xp per heart only) until at the end of the game when whole board is cleared. It won't be the end of the world if this happens, but it can't happen more than a few times to get a max clear.
- Do not kill an enemy if it does not provide new board information (unless you absolutely have to in order to avoid wasting hearts before leveling, or to avoid denomination problems, see below).
- Prefer to open board squares that cost least lives first. The game is all about paying hearts to buy board information, so you of course want to buy as cheap as possible. (there are tradeoffs of course which makes the game interesting, see below)
- The very moment you reach lv10, you should kill the mine king for the boost to XP. (as corollary, the game objective is to identify where mine king is before lv10 is reached) . If you have 10 hearts and use a heart scroll, while mine king is still alive, the play was suboptimal.
- If you don't know which corner the mine king is when you reach lv10, then if you want to live on the edge, you might calculate how many >P10 unidentified mines + mimic chest remain that could live in the corners, vs how many unknown squares exist, and if the odds are exceedingly in your favor, then just take a calculated guess and pick a random corner.
- If you have a choice of killing e.g. a P5 enemy or a P2+P3 enemy, there is an interesting complex tradeoff to be made:
a) do I prefer to kill the P5 enemy, so that I ensure that the lower denominations of 2 and 3 will remain available, to leave less chance of wasting hearts later on (due to not having the exact denomination to kill), or
b) assuming that the P2+P3 are both at the boundary of information, do I prefer to kill those two enemies rather than one P5, since the two enemies will provide one more square of board information for the same cost.
Early on in the game, a) seems to be more important.
At first I thought that a) would have always been more important (i.e. optimal play is bottlenecked on denominations throughout to the end), but after playing several max clears, it is apparent that in the middle game and later, one will already have plenty of P1, P2 and P3 denominations available to kill when needed, so then b) is more productive.
- Another example of a denomination tradeoff is e.g. when pondering if to kill a P4+P1 or a P3+P2. Assuming produced board information would be indifferent/equivalent, it is generally better to kill P3+P2, to keep the P1 for later to help with a denomination problem. (of course one can "read ahead" to the health bar, to know which denominations will be needed)
- Never commit to batch kill multiple enemies at once, but always re-evaluate the new board state after each kill, and only then make another move. (don't mindlessly commit to mass murder thinking "I've got 7HP so I'll kill those P3+P3+P1"). Maybe after killing the first P3, you realize that you don't gain info from killing the rest. Kill the enemies in the descending order of most info to least info.
- Before deciding to open a given board square, pause to think what new board information opening that cell can provide. I.e. ask "If I knew what number was in this cell, would it even help me deduce the power number of any adjacent cell?" If not, then opening that cell is not immediately productive. Prefer to open those cell squares first that do expand the information boundary, and leave the cell squares that do not for later.
- Use monsternomicon's "monsters of each type remaining" info to deduce complex two-cell patterns. Sometimes the monsternomicon's numbers fully reveal what two adjacent cells summing up to X will have to contain. (although not which one is which)
- At very early game, I like to build up small denominations to have available when needed. Towards the middle game, denominations won't be a problem, so maximizing boundary information is more important instead.
- There will be times when one has to guess. Some guesses are nonlethal ("whatever lurks here can't kill me"), and other guesses are lethal ("I might die if I click here"). Naturally make only nonlethal guesses, in the descending order of "most board information gained."
- In an unlucky run, one might have to make a lethal guess, but that does not seem to happen that often, which is a testament to the balance of the game. When going for the lovers+rats+egg stamp victory, this happens way more often, since the rats easily get in the way.
- At the very end, when all board cells have been identified, one will typically still have lots of monsters alive on the board, something like this:
From here on, it is a mop up game, given that there are plenty of P1 and P2 and P3 still available to steer clear of running into denomination problems.
- There are always more hearts on the board than are needed to clear everything. My record is 10 hearts remaining at the end of a game.
Okay, for some reason I can't get the "Lover's Survive" achievement. I just finished a map where I didn't uncover the two 9-value lovers (They're still hidden under grey stone). Shouldn't that have triggered the achievement?
First off, I like the game enough to have beaten it fully on both the original version and the updated version. I've found that I can consistently get a perfect score, so it would be great if there was a way to make the game more difficult (easier said than done, I know). However, I know that Minesweeper is very easy on expert mode, so maybe it's just the difficulty ceiling of this type of game... Great job though!
This is the kind of game that made me want to start game development as a hobby. Love the twist on a well-known game. Love the depth. Love the balancing.
Maybe you should figure out why everybody else seams to loves it. When designing your games it might be good to know what other players like that you don’t?
I found another monster behaviour: Minotaurs are always adjacent to a treasure chest, and facing away from it. They might be one row above or below it, tho
If you open the chest before killing them, they will turn around and get a "startled" expression.
Call me a hater, but this hits no fun difficultly. I cannot express how much minesweeper ive played and how unbalanced this game seems. I might try again later but after 30+ tries i'm sick of it.
I think you might be missing some information, if you pay attention to the layouts of the enemies when you die you may be able to discern some helpful patterns…
The fact that you write "blind guesses" states that you have missed something.
There are nonlethal guesses that one has to often make in the game. Learning to understand the dynamics of such guesses is what the game is about. After mastering, it is rather easy to manage these, and the game becomes consistently beatable.
Then there are lethal guesses, that one makes when things have gone bad. This happens rarely if playing with a good strategy, though can happen (especially on the first few moves, when the discovered board size is still so tiny). If going for the three stamps extra achievement victory, then this happens more often, because the rats get in the way. But in general play, it is possible to beat the game with a routine.
Not all games are for everyone. It is good to learn that, and if/when that happens, just move on, rather than to get worked up for no reason and go shouting in the comments.
I get the layouts, its not a good minesweeper layout. I understand if i see a row of 8s theres a quick 1 hit enemy in the back. I get the ?s and the pattern of the map. This is closer to a puzzle game with one critical path than a minesweeper game where youre exploring a map and given information to clear the map. In the game of minesweeper, you don't need meta knowledge to beat the map youre playing. In minesweeper, theres very few instances where you have to make a blind guess into territory to find and 8 spot surrounded by mines. This game isn't very fun, in my honest opinion and im glad you find this enjoyable yourself but don't tell me im missing information. The game isn't designed in a way that i find enjoyable and ive decided its not a game for me. I dont hate it, but as a game designer myself i feel that the direction this game decided to go in is fundamentally against the design of minesweeper itself. If theres only one critical path to winning the game, then its not a very good minesweeper game in its design in my opinion. And im allowed to feel this way, the same way you feel like its a simple game.
I concur with what others have told you. I think you might be missing something. I just started playing this yesterday, and after failing the first few tries, it's pretty easy to beat the game consistently. The hard part is getting the perfect score, that I have not yet achieved. And sure, if you know the "1" surrounded by "8" pattern, you can go faster, etc. but those are not needed for beating the game (I just learned about them a few mins ago reading comments here actually, but it was never a blocker for finishing the game).
But the design is minesweeper with hidden information. Every enemy except for the bats, skeletons and green slimes has a feature that you can use to make deductions:
Why are there different sprites for the mice?
Why are the shields of the guardians different?
Why does the minotaur turn around when you open a chest?
Is there a pattern in how gargoyles appear?
Where does the mine-exploding scroll skeleton usually appear?
Having played earlier versions of this game, where the last meaningful action you could take was killing the dragon, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to get the max score on the newer versions of the game.
There is no pattern to the bats and skeletons that I've figured out so far. The gnome appears in a random blank space, and if you hit him, he teleports and hides in another one. If there are no more blank spaces, he's trapped and you "defeat" him, and can claim his 9 exp bounty
I mean Top Right second row, the 7, the Guardian, the guy with the sword and shield. its position usually indicates something, but I can't tell what this one's supposed to be telling me.
Ooh, I didn't notice Bomb Stopper is holding a bomb until now!
There are four Guardians, each of them have a different symbol on their shield, if that helps as a hint.
Spoiler
Each Guardian exists in one of the four quadrants of the map, as indicated on their shield. So if you know where the guardian is in a quadrant, you know it is impossible to encounter another 7 there.
You'll see your files and folders... click through to where your Dragonsweeper folder is that you unzipped. Click on index.html -- you should be able to play the game. It'll be the older version with the two orbs start.
I'm not convinced by the argument that you should save heart scrolls because they're "worth more" later in the game. Levelling is also "worth more" later in the game! In my experience, if you use a scroll earlier, you'll have more XP for levelling later, and in the end game it all comes out in the wash.
You should save heart scrolls because:
1. You can use a heart scroll at any time, but you can only level if you have enough XP. You can get stuck with not enough XP and either no hearts available to get more or no safe moves available to get more.
2. Using a heart scroll makes you repeat the current heart level. This can be damaging early in the game, when you have a much more limited set of safe moves available, they don't always open up more safe moves, and using up more of them without progressing towards being able to take out bigger monsters (especially the mine king) can hurt you.
The time to think about this is not when you have no choice but to use a heart scroll, but when you are considering possible monster combinations earlier -- it's usually better to fill your XP and level than to risk not filling it and falling short. Especially if you're trying to get the rat stamp, which makes exploration very risky, and makes eliminating known monsters until you find the rat king a lot safer.
So, to refute that point, first let's establish that, with the exception of walls, every time you spend life, you gain that much experience. Sometimes you can get experience for free, and walls are a loss on return and should always be broken last, anyway. In all other cases, you spend your HP, and if you don't die, you get that much in EXP back. Let's also understand that there is a max HP, but there is no max EXP, you can pool it as much as you want.
At the start of the game, you have 5 HP, and you need 4 EXP to level up. You spend your 5 life, and you now have 5 EXP. You now have the choice to either level up or to use a heal scroll. In the first case, your health refills back up to 5 (with half a heart towards a max of 6 next level!) and you have 1 EXP banked towards reaching the new limit of 5 EXP. If you use a health scroll, you refill your 5 hearts right away, and keep your 5 banked EXP.
Here's the crux of the matter. No matter which scenario you pick, you still have to spend 4 EXP to level up. You're not saving it for later, you STILL have to spend that 4 EXP, you're just delaying when you spend it. However, since there is a direct relationship between HP and EXP, you have assigned that scroll a worth of 5 EXP while using it while your max HP is only 5 hearts. If you waited until you had, say, 7 hearts or 10 hearts or even more, that is how much EXP that scroll would be worth. By using it early, you miss out on the potential for that scroll to be even more valuable. Meanwhile, the experience you gain by spending your health down as normal is experience you will gain one way or the other, and it will be spent on leveling up one way or the other. Scrolls are always worth more the longer you hold off of using them.
That said, unless you're aiming for something in specific, you don't have to be perfectly 100% optimal to win. It helps your odds, for sure, but if you would rather use a scroll for safety than take a gamble on something you're unsure on, its better to keep the run going than not.
OK, after a bunch of paper and pencil calculations I remembered that the game has a debug mode. :) I compared a couple of strategies for using the scrolls (various numbers of scrolls and different bonuses ignored or not), and I can see now how the maths works.
The lower early value of the scrolls is partially offset by the lower amount of XP needed to level at the early stages, which makes the penalty less noticeable in a typical game, but in extreme cases (all available scrolls spent before any levelling) the constant low value of the scrolls plus the additional HP gained and spent during levelling is not enough to match the increasing XP cost of levelling. That was the missing link for me.
I'm somehow unable to get the full clear (max score of 365). I got the other 3 stamps already, but I always seem to miscalculate somehow. My strategy is to get 0 hearts and then either level up or get a full health boost and repeat. Do I need to do something else as well? Certain monsters at specfic health levels or something?
It's important to get at least some of the free exp drops early so that you can save your health scrolls as long as possible. HP = EXP, but things like chests and the egg give you an advantage in that calculation. Always try to drain your HP to 0 hearts before leveling up, and if you have the choice between leveling up and using a health scroll, level up. The more health you have, the more health a scroll is "worth", so saving them as long as possible gives you more total effective health. Also, you want to kill the lich as SOON as you have 10 hearts, or as close to then as possible. That gives you a massive load of experience you can use to carry you through the next few levels without using scrolls.
There is no downside to using the explode mines scroll immediately. When shooting for max score of 365, it is best to plan to find and use the scroll so that you can trigger it immediately when you XP up to 10 hearts.
It's not a 100% guaranteed possibility like with earlier easier versions. Never heal up unless you've depleted your health pool. Minotaurs always guard a chest. And chests are always guarded by minotaurs. Guardians are 1 per qudrant. Use that info when calculating exploration risk, but don't forget the 9HP and 11HP oddities. Level up instead of healing whenever you can. THE VERY MOMENT you hit 10HP, take out the bomb lich and score another easy level up. Look for the 8x8x8 pattern of the slime wizard and deep strike on his butt (You can blind jump into a square). Learn the ? gazers patterns and they can similarly be nuked from orbit with pinpoint precision. Try not to waste HP on walls until the very last sweep and remember you can kill the dragon for 13G without ending the run which comes in handy on that very last cleanup pass. Play cleverly and take every advantage of the numbers. I can pull it off maybe 30% of the time.
I don’t know if my numbers are correct but if they are.. in theory the max possible “3 stamp run” would be 331/365. I don’t know if it’s possible in acount to levels.
This information needs leveling information to accompany to make it truly useful. Just did a quick and dirty full clear to get this data, will analyze it in a moment to see what a "perfect run" would look like.
Edit: Level 11 is 18 for level up, not 17, I had to check again because math wasn't mathing.
Ok, I've done the math, you have EXACTLY enough health to be able to reach 325 on a three stamp run, so leaving just the walls, the rats (rat king is fine), the lovers, and the egg. You need to use your first HP scroll once you're on 9 hearts, even with perfect play that's as best as you can get. To pull that off, you also need to find the three exp chest as well as isolate the gnome BEFORE you reach 10 hearts and can pop the Lich, just to have enough EXP. Then you should be able to just spend your scrolls as needed, prioritizing level ups. You should be on track if you use your second health scroll on 11.5 hearts, and then one scroll per level before you run out.
This is a very minor thing, but while the EXP math is correct to my eyes, its important to note that the 9 HP scrolls on the map include the ones in the chests. So there are 2 in the chests, and then 7 otherwise (2 of those 7 being entangled with the Lovers, of course)
Most browsers won't let JavaScript to load local files for security theater reasons.
You'll either have to host it with a local web server, or embed the resources as data URLs. If you do the latter and want to open it in Firefox, you'll have to re-encode the music file, as it exceeds the Firefox's limit on data URL's length.
They just sort of jumbled some screenshots and added another random game and an irrelevant description which is funny. Thought I'd give you a heads up.
I ended up patching a function into loadImage that substituted base64 encoded copies of the graphics to get my copy working without disabling CORS in FireFox (file:// is automatically assumed to be dirty by default.).
Dunno why audio didn’t trip CORS, but I won’t complain if the offical version also gets a 830kb js file just to hold the additional code with the encoded files.
There is a space next to the Dragon, randomly chosen from the 8 adjacent spaces, that contains an egg. It registers as a 0, so you have to get kind of lucky to isolate it from regular blanks near the dragon, that or you just avoid breaking 0s near the dragon entirely. If you break it, you can get a free 3 exp, but if you preserve it to the end, you get the achievement.
There is a way to make it less random if you’re just going for the Future Generations achievement
Spoiler
Leave the squares around the dragon unclicked unless you know for certain they contain a monster. When you get the blue orb scroll, don’t use it. Save it for close to the end and if it has nowhere else to proc, it will reveal the squares around the dragon.
It’s not a slamdunk with the three stamp attempt, because you likely won’t have enough hearts to clear the board unless you’re very careful about only spending hearts on unrevealed monsters (vs the slimes that get revealed by the slime mage scroll).
I found the best strat for the three stamp run is to restart the game (you can just press R for a quick reset) until you get a favorable starting reveal. Ideally you want the mice to limit the search area for the rat king to no more than 3 columns or, ideally, indicate the exact column it’s in. Otherwise it’s almost impossible not to accidentally click on unrevealed mice as you work your way through the board.
I have absolutely been in love with this game since I stumbled across it at 1.0. I love the challenge of it and all the secret tricks of the monsters, giving you the tools to solve otherwise impossible scenarios using logic. It's very satisfying and I keep the tab open because I want to play it again and again. Just now I finished a run, challenging myself to get three stamps in one go. Excited to see what else comes out of this game, thank you for all your hard work.
← Return to game
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Here's my walkthrough (game v1.1.18), with which max clears are easy. Intense spoiler heavy (will spoil the game, probably will only want to read after completing everything yourself):
- What I love about this game is that it is like a mini-version in the spirit of FTL and Into the Breach. "The game is to learn the game." So below is what I have learned about it. With the walkthrough below, the joy of discovering the game might be taken away (at least if I had read this before playing, I would feel having lost something), so read at your own peril.
- Overall, fantastic game! I wish for a harder New Game+ mode with new monsters and patterns that one could attempt after completing a regular board, where one would really have to pause to make only the most calculated moves.
- You've probably learned all the monsters RPG patterns, many comments about those already. Knowing about the monsters is not really needed to get a max clear (but of course makes the game much easier). I did my first max score before picking up on that the board was not random.
- From the start, easy way to get past the first "missing XP to level up" hill is to explore immediately towards the egg. It is semi-easily locatable free +3xp, and helps avoid using a heart scroll at early game.
- Whenever board permits, speculate the play direction towards where the wizard's lair could lie. Since it is kind of big with its 2x3 cell pattern and always on the edge, its location is quite constrained. After finding the edge/corner, sniping the wizard is super beneficial for uncovering information, since it reveals the 2x3 cell and P5 enemies. Makes ruling out rat king easier as well.
- Plan so you never need to bash the walls (+1/3 xp per heart only) until at the end of the game when whole board is cleared. It won't be the end of the world if this happens, but it can't happen more than a few times to get a max clear.
- Do not kill an enemy if it does not provide new board information (unless you absolutely have to in order to avoid wasting hearts before leveling, or to avoid denomination problems, see below).
- Prefer to open board squares that cost least lives first. The game is all about paying hearts to buy board information, so you of course want to buy as cheap as possible. (there are tradeoffs of course which makes the game interesting, see below)
- The very moment you reach lv10, you should kill the mine king for the boost to XP. (as corollary, the game objective is to identify where mine king is before lv10 is reached) . If you have 10 hearts and use a heart scroll, while mine king is still alive, the play was suboptimal.
- If you don't know which corner the mine king is when you reach lv10, then if you want to live on the edge, you might calculate how many >P10 unidentified mines + mimic chest remain that could live in the corners, vs how many unknown squares exist, and if the odds are exceedingly in your favor, then just take a calculated guess and pick a random corner.
- If you have a choice of killing e.g. a P5 enemy or a P2+P3 enemy, there is an interesting complex tradeoff to be made:
a) do I prefer to kill the P5 enemy, so that I ensure that the lower denominations of 2 and 3 will remain available, to leave less chance of wasting hearts later on (due to not having the exact denomination to kill), or
b) assuming that the P2+P3 are both at the boundary of information, do I prefer to kill those two enemies rather than one P5, since the two enemies will provide one more square of board information for the same cost.
Early on in the game, a) seems to be more important.
At first I thought that a) would have always been more important (i.e. optimal play is bottlenecked on denominations throughout to the end), but after playing several max clears, it is apparent that in the middle game and later, one will already have plenty of P1, P2 and P3 denominations available to kill when needed, so then b) is more productive.
- Another example of a denomination tradeoff is e.g. when pondering if to kill a P4+P1 or a P3+P2. Assuming produced board information would be indifferent/equivalent, it is generally better to kill P3+P2, to keep the P1 for later to help with a denomination problem. (of course one can "read ahead" to the health bar, to know which denominations will be needed)
- Never commit to batch kill multiple enemies at once, but always re-evaluate the new board state after each kill, and only then make another move. (don't mindlessly commit to mass murder thinking "I've got 7HP so I'll kill those P3+P3+P1"). Maybe after killing the first P3, you realize that you don't gain info from killing the rest. Kill the enemies in the descending order of most info to least info.
- Before deciding to open a given board square, pause to think what new board information opening that cell can provide. I.e. ask "If I knew what number was in this cell, would it even help me deduce the power number of any adjacent cell?" If not, then opening that cell is not immediately productive. Prefer to open those cell squares first that do expand the information boundary, and leave the cell squares that do not for later.
- Use monsternomicon's "monsters of each type remaining" info to deduce complex two-cell patterns. Sometimes the monsternomicon's numbers fully reveal what two adjacent cells summing up to X will have to contain. (although not which one is which)
- At very early game, I like to build up small denominations to have available when needed. Towards the middle game, denominations won't be a problem, so maximizing boundary information is more important instead.
- There will be times when one has to guess. Some guesses are nonlethal ("whatever lurks here can't kill me"), and other guesses are lethal ("I might die if I click here"). Naturally make only nonlethal guesses, in the descending order of "most board information gained."
- In an unlucky run, one might have to make a lethal guess, but that does not seem to happen that often, which is a testament to the balance of the game. When going for the lovers+rats+egg stamp victory, this happens way more often, since the rats easily get in the way.
- At the very end, when all board cells have been identified, one will typically still have lots of monsters alive on the board, something like this:
From here on, it is a mop up game, given that there are plenty of P1 and P2 and P3 still available to steer clear of running into denomination problems.
- There are always more hearts on the board than are needed to clear everything. My record is 10 hearts remaining at the end of a game.
Okay, for some reason I can't get the "Lover's Survive" achievement. I just finished a map where I didn't uncover the two 9-value lovers (They're still hidden under grey stone). Shouldn't that have triggered the achievement?
I think so, yes.
First off, I like the game enough to have beaten it fully on both the original version and the updated version. I've found that I can consistently get a perfect score, so it would be great if there was a way to make the game more difficult (easier said than done, I know). However, I know that Minesweeper is very easy on expert mode, so maybe it's just the difficulty ceiling of this type of game... Great job though!
Why is there an option to mark a square with a 12?
Absolutely loved it! Didn't know how to play Minesweeper, so I learned just so I could play this. Game of the year!
so, the unique text for deaths are:
Zapped by the wizard
Slain by a skeleton
petrified by a gargoyle
consumed by a slime
lobotimized by a gazer
Trampled by a minotaur
liquified by a slime (the purple ones around the wizard, I'm not sure why they have the same name as the green ones)
Mauled by Romeo
Mauled by Juliet
crushed by the mine king
eaten by the mimic
Torched by the dragon
exploded by a mine
Brilliant, and a severe threat to the paper writing I'm supposed to do 😅
is this supposed to happen?
Yes, it's health was decreased from 15 to 13 in the latest update
This is the kind of game that made me want to start game development as a hobby. Love the twist on a well-known game. Love the depth. Love the balancing.
I beat it. My opinions still stand.
Maybe you should figure out why everybody else seams to loves it. When designing your games it might be good to know what other players like that you don’t?
I found another monster behaviour: Minotaurs are always adjacent to a treasure chest, and facing away from it. They might be one row above or below it, tho
If you open the chest before killing them, they will turn around and get a "startled" expression.
I desire the music!
This game is awesome, thank you so much
Got me locked in for 30 minutes & pretty good
I used debug for this run. you should add some sort of indicator to the end screen so people don't try to pass debug runs off as real
Why on earth is this game so HARD i love minesweeper and this is stressing me out lmao
Call me a hater, but this hits no fun difficultly. I cannot express how much minesweeper ive played and how unbalanced this game seems. I might try again later but after 30+ tries i'm sick of it.
I think you might be missing some information, if you pay attention to the layouts of the enemies when you die you may be able to discern some helpful patterns…
Im going to beat this game just so i can explain fully why i actually very much dislike this game okay
I beat it, and theres honestly no reason why there should be that many blind guesses to win.
The fact that you write "blind guesses" states that you have missed something.
There are nonlethal guesses that one has to often make in the game. Learning to understand the dynamics of such guesses is what the game is about. After mastering, it is rather easy to manage these, and the game becomes consistently beatable.
Then there are lethal guesses, that one makes when things have gone bad. This happens rarely if playing with a good strategy, though can happen (especially on the first few moves, when the discovered board size is still so tiny). If going for the three stamps extra achievement victory, then this happens more often, because the rats get in the way. But in general play, it is possible to beat the game with a routine.
Not all games are for everyone. It is good to learn that, and if/when that happens, just move on, rather than to get worked up for no reason and go shouting in the comments.
I get the layouts, its not a good minesweeper layout. I understand if i see a row of 8s theres a quick 1 hit enemy in the back. I get the ?s and the pattern of the map. This is closer to a puzzle game with one critical path than a minesweeper game where youre exploring a map and given information to clear the map. In the game of minesweeper, you don't need meta knowledge to beat the map youre playing. In minesweeper, theres very few instances where you have to make a blind guess into territory to find and 8 spot surrounded by mines.
This game isn't very fun, in my honest opinion and im glad you find this enjoyable yourself but don't tell me im missing information. The game isn't designed in a way that i find enjoyable and ive decided its not a game for me. I dont hate it, but as a game designer myself i feel that the direction this game decided to go in is fundamentally against the design of minesweeper itself.
If theres only one critical path to winning the game, then its not a very good minesweeper game in its design in my opinion. And im allowed to feel this way, the same way you feel like its a simple game.
I concur with what others have told you. I think you might be missing something. I just started playing this yesterday, and after failing the first few tries, it's pretty easy to beat the game consistently. The hard part is getting the perfect score, that I have not yet achieved. And sure, if you know the "1" surrounded by "8" pattern, you can go faster, etc. but those are not needed for beating the game (I just learned about them a few mins ago reading comments here actually, but it was never a blocker for finishing the game).
But the design is minesweeper with hidden information. Every enemy except for the bats, skeletons and green slimes has a feature that you can use to make deductions:
etc etc
Make sure you are collecting XP, leveling up at the right time and saving hearts for when you absolutely need them.
Yeah, that's obvious enough.
Having played earlier versions of this game, where the last meaningful action you could take was killing the dragon, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to get the max score on the newer versions of the game.
Oh my gosh THANK YOU for posting this! I was making exactly the same mistake and only realised after reading your comment.
victory
alright boys who can beat 6:27 max score
ayy
Beat this time on a 3 stamp run!
I don’t know why it’s 8 it felt longer when I was doing the run so my time my be bugged. I’m playing it in the webrowser on an android phone.
nice.....either way I gotta beat 8:05 now!
I can't stop playing! <3
A+
What do the skeletons, bats, and gnome do?
I think I've managed to figure everyone else's trick out.
There is no pattern to the bats and skeletons that I've figured out so far. The gnome appears in a random blank space, and if you hit him, he teleports and hides in another one. If there are no more blank spaces, he's trapped and you "defeat" him, and can claim his 9 exp bounty
What's the Top Right Guardian guarding?
on version 1.1.18
Top right ? if you mean top left he disable all the bombs
I mean Top Right second row, the 7, the Guardian, the guy with the sword and shield. its position usually indicates something, but I can't tell what this one's supposed to be telling me.
Ooh, I didn't notice Bomb Stopper is holding a bomb until now!
There are four Guardians, each of them have a different symbol on their shield, if that helps as a hint.
Spoiler
Each Guardian exists in one of the four quadrants of the map, as indicated on their shield. So if you know where the guardian is in a quadrant, you know it is impossible to encounter another 7 there.
Too bad we can't do HTML in comments?
https://itch.io/t/2151831/adding-spoiler-text-to-your-game-description
Oh, I found a false pattern! Pattern Spoilers:
I thought the Guardians were like Minotaurs, but instead of 1 space away from a Chest, they were 2 spaces or something.
I've tried this game on my desktop and on my laptop and both are stuck on the loading screen(colored lines). Anyone know what is going on
If you open your browser's developer tools, do you see any error messages in the console?
Solution if you are on Mac:
1. Open the "Terminal" application. Enter the following text and press enter:
python -m http.server
2. Open your browser and go to:
http://localhost:8000/
You'll see your files and folders... click through to where your Dragonsweeper folder is that you unzipped. Click on index.html -- you should be able to play the game. It'll be the older version with the two orbs start.
I would do but I just tried running it in the browser and it's actually working. This is an addictive game :D
I'm not convinced by the argument that you should save heart scrolls because they're "worth more" later in the game. Levelling is also "worth more" later in the game! In my experience, if you use a scroll earlier, you'll have more XP for levelling later, and in the end game it all comes out in the wash.
You should save heart scrolls because:
1. You can use a heart scroll at any time, but you can only level if you have enough XP. You can get stuck with not enough XP and either no hearts available to get more or no safe moves available to get more.
2. Using a heart scroll makes you repeat the current heart level. This can be damaging early in the game, when you have a much more limited set of safe moves available, they don't always open up more safe moves, and using up more of them without progressing towards being able to take out bigger monsters (especially the mine king) can hurt you.
The time to think about this is not when you have no choice but to use a heart scroll, but when you are considering possible monster combinations earlier -- it's usually better to fill your XP and level than to risk not filling it and falling short. Especially if you're trying to get the rat stamp, which makes exploration very risky, and makes eliminating known monsters until you find the rat king a lot safer.
So, to refute that point, first let's establish that, with the exception of walls, every time you spend life, you gain that much experience. Sometimes you can get experience for free, and walls are a loss on return and should always be broken last, anyway. In all other cases, you spend your HP, and if you don't die, you get that much in EXP back. Let's also understand that there is a max HP, but there is no max EXP, you can pool it as much as you want.
At the start of the game, you have 5 HP, and you need 4 EXP to level up. You spend your 5 life, and you now have 5 EXP. You now have the choice to either level up or to use a heal scroll. In the first case, your health refills back up to 5 (with half a heart towards a max of 6 next level!) and you have 1 EXP banked towards reaching the new limit of 5 EXP. If you use a health scroll, you refill your 5 hearts right away, and keep your 5 banked EXP.
Here's the crux of the matter. No matter which scenario you pick, you still have to spend 4 EXP to level up. You're not saving it for later, you STILL have to spend that 4 EXP, you're just delaying when you spend it. However, since there is a direct relationship between HP and EXP, you have assigned that scroll a worth of 5 EXP while using it while your max HP is only 5 hearts. If you waited until you had, say, 7 hearts or 10 hearts or even more, that is how much EXP that scroll would be worth. By using it early, you miss out on the potential for that scroll to be even more valuable. Meanwhile, the experience you gain by spending your health down as normal is experience you will gain one way or the other, and it will be spent on leveling up one way or the other. Scrolls are always worth more the longer you hold off of using them.
That said, unless you're aiming for something in specific, you don't have to be perfectly 100% optimal to win. It helps your odds, for sure, but if you would rather use a scroll for safety than take a gamble on something you're unsure on, its better to keep the run going than not.
OK, after a bunch of paper and pencil calculations I remembered that the game has a debug mode. :) I compared a couple of strategies for using the scrolls (various numbers of scrolls and different bonuses ignored or not), and I can see now how the maths works.
The lower early value of the scrolls is partially offset by the lower amount of XP needed to level at the early stages, which makes the penalty less noticeable in a typical game, but in extreme cases (all available scrolls spent before any levelling) the constant low value of the scrolls plus the additional HP gained and spent during levelling is not enough to match the increasing XP cost of levelling. That was the missing link for me.
How do you access debug mode in the current version? Used to be you could just hit D, but that was removed.
Shift+D
Bless, this is very useful for testing things, thank you
I'm somehow unable to get the full clear (max score of 365). I got the other 3 stamps already, but I always seem to miscalculate somehow. My strategy is to get 0 hearts and then either level up or get a full health boost and repeat. Do I need to do something else as well? Certain monsters at specfic health levels or something?
It's important to get at least some of the free exp drops early so that you can save your health scrolls as long as possible. HP = EXP, but things like chests and the egg give you an advantage in that calculation. Always try to drain your HP to 0 hearts before leveling up, and if you have the choice between leveling up and using a health scroll, level up. The more health you have, the more health a scroll is "worth", so saving them as long as possible gives you more total effective health. Also, you want to kill the lich as SOON as you have 10 hearts, or as close to then as possible. That gives you a massive load of experience you can use to carry you through the next few levels without using scrolls.
Agree with above, plus I like to save using the "explode mines" scroll until I have figured out where all the mines are (if possible).
Why? You can find mines with less risk once they're exploded.
There is no downside to using the explode mines scroll immediately. When shooting for max score of 365, it is best to plan to find and use the scroll so that you can trigger it immediately when you XP up to 10 hearts.
It's not a 100% guaranteed possibility like with earlier easier versions. Never heal up unless you've depleted your health pool. Minotaurs always guard a chest. And chests are always guarded by minotaurs. Guardians are 1 per qudrant. Use that info when calculating exploration risk, but don't forget the 9HP and 11HP oddities. Level up instead of healing whenever you can. THE VERY MOMENT you hit 10HP, take out the bomb lich and score another easy level up. Look for the 8x8x8 pattern of the slime wizard and deep strike on his butt (You can blind jump into a square). Learn the ? gazers patterns and they can similarly be nuked from orbit with pinpoint precision. Try not to waste HP on walls until the very last sweep and remember you can kill the dragon for 13G without ending the run which comes in handy on that very last cleanup pass. Play cleverly and take every advantage of the numbers. I can pull it off maybe 30% of the time.
I don’t know if my numbers are correct but if they are.. in theory the max possible “3 stamp run” would be 331/365. I don’t know if it’s possible in acount to levels.
This information needs leveling information to accompany to make it truly useful. Just did a quick and dirty full clear to get this data,
will analyze it in a moment to see what a "perfect run" would look like.
Edit: Level 11 is 18 for level up, not 17, I had to check again because math wasn't mathing.
Ok, I've done the math, you have EXACTLY enough health to be able to reach 325 on a three stamp run, so leaving just the walls, the rats (rat king is fine), the lovers, and the egg. You need to use your first HP scroll once you're on 9 hearts, even with perfect play that's as best as you can get. To pull that off, you also need to find the three exp chest as well as isolate the gnome BEFORE you reach 10 hearts and can pop the Lich, just to have enough EXP. Then you should be able to just spend your scrolls as needed, prioritizing level ups. You should be on track if you use your second health scroll on 11.5 hearts, and then one scroll per level before you run out.
I was a fraid of that. Hunting down the gnome before 10 seams super hard. Well now we know time to grind 🤣
303 so 22 to go!
Awesome work!
Couldn't have done it without you doing your own due diligence, thank you for that.
After a bit of experimenting i believe the lack of something meaningful to hit that takes 1 heart is a real problem mid (5-10) game.
You have to push to find the minotaurs/chests/gnome but you end up in a situation where you hit a 6 with 7 hearts or a 5 with 6 hearts.
225 score 3 stamps might be just to much luck to be a fun chalange 🤔
This is a very minor thing, but while the EXP math is correct to my eyes, its important to note that the 9 HP scrolls on the map include the ones in the chests. So there are 2 in the chests, and then 7 otherwise (2 of those 7 being entangled with the Lovers, of course)
Yes, this is badly explained in my data as taking scrolls yealds no points.
9 scrolls total = 5 random on map + 2 chests + 2 from lovers.
In a “Max stamp run” the max scrolls leavs you with 7 scrolls as you can’t kill the lovers.
Hehehe 3 stamps at once
I love the game, but is it possible to play this game offline? I've tried to open the gamefile but I get hit with this error
Show post...
ive also gotten an error.. its odd
Most browsers won't let JavaScript to load local files for security theater reasons.
You'll either have to host it with a local web server, or embed the resources as data URLs. If you do the latter and want to open it in Firefox, you'll have to re-encode the music file, as it exceeds the Firefox's limit on data URL's length.
I'm getting super fast, but the downside is now my screenshots look awkward :(
0:7:53 instead of 0:07:53
=)
nice, i'm only running max score though, you can have any% :)
Two things: 1) This is such a fun little game and I definitely should not have spent so much time playing it at work LMAO
2) Someone is trying to steal your game and is attempting to release it on the App Store (I saw it on Apple's). https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dragonsweeper-a-stratergy-game/id6739958486
They just sort of jumbled some screenshots and added another random game and an irrelevant description which is funny.
Thought I'd give you a heads up.
Donated :)) great game!
Downloaded for offline use, but the index.html gets stuck in Firefox and Chromium. Game works fine when running from itch.io page.
Any ideas?
I get the same glitch on itch.io, after my first time playing a few dozen rounds
For me, my web browser did not like loading local files. I had to restart chrome with the "--allow-file-access-from-files" flag:
see:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18474727/canvas-has-been-tainted-by-cross-or...
I ended up patching a function into
loadImagethat substituted base64 encoded copies of the graphics to get my copy working without disabling CORS in FireFox (file://is automatically assumed to be dirty by default.).Dunno why audio didn’t trip CORS, but I won’t complain if the offical version also gets a 830kb js file just to hold the additional code with the encoded files.
see https://itch.io/post/12090872
Soundtrack release? please?
Almost… I missed one chest forceing me to take one heart abit early. It may be possible to get 3 achevments and get 325+ 🤔
Ps. Timer seams to be bugged.. this did not take me 8 minutes 😉
What's up the "Future Generations" achievement? I've never come across that egg and I don't see it in the Monsternomicon
Spoiler
There is a space next to the Dragon, randomly chosen from the 8 adjacent spaces, that contains an egg. It registers as a 0, so you have to get kind of lucky to isolate it from regular blanks near the dragon, that or you just avoid breaking 0s near the dragon entirely. If you break it, you can get a free 3 exp, but if you preserve it to the end, you get the achievement.
There is a way to make it less random if you’re just going for the Future Generations achievement
Spoiler
Leave the squares around the dragon unclicked unless you know for certain they contain a monster. When you get the blue orb scroll, don’t use it. Save it for close to the end and if it has nowhere else to proc, it will reveal the squares around the dragon.
Oh, I didn't know that! I'll be sure to try that on my next three-stamp attempt. Thank you!
It’s not a slamdunk with the three stamp attempt, because you likely won’t have enough hearts to clear the board unless you’re very careful about only spending hearts on unrevealed monsters (vs the slimes that get revealed by the slime mage scroll).
I found the best strat for the three stamp run is to restart the game (you can just press R for a quick reset) until you get a favorable starting reveal. Ideally you want the mice to limit the search area for the rat king to no more than 3 columns or, ideally, indicate the exact column it’s in. Otherwise it’s almost impossible not to accidentally click on unrevealed mice as you work your way through the board.
This is big brain
I have absolutely been in love with this game since I stumbled across it at 1.0. I love the challenge of it and all the secret tricks of the monsters, giving you the tools to solve otherwise impossible scenarios using logic. It's very satisfying and I keep the tab open because I want to play it again and again. Just now I finished a run, challenging myself to get three stamps in one go. Excited to see what else comes out of this game, thank you for all your hard work.
Cool
How do you get a clear board stamp with the other stamps? Isn't clearing the board mutually exclusive with not killing rats/egg/lovers?
This is the summary of stamps got from previous games. So these stamps were getted from multiple games, at least 2.
noooo this is so sad 😭😭😭
i've killed everyone, but at what cost?