This is a great game which has provided me with hours of entertainment -- thank you for making it!
Here's some feedback about the new version:
Pros:
* New marking method: awesome! So much better than cycling through the numbers.
* Overall, I like that the game is more difficult now. In the previous version, if you don't have bad luck or screw up, you're pretty much guaranteed a perfect score every time. In this version this is more of a challenge. (Some of the difficulty is probably due to me not noticing some subtleties in the patterns; I just figured out something new while writing this comment. :) )
* New level 9 monsters -- yay! It makes guessing harder, and I like the pattern.
Neutral (not sure how I feel about these):
* Identical walls: I liked the unpredictability of the variable walls in the previous version, but maybe this didn't work as well with the adjusted stats.
* New gnome animation and sound: I don't love this, but it does make it clearer how the gnome works.
Cons:
* The board arbitrarily resizing to the window height: this causes the graphics to be antialiased / blurred, which does not flatter the pixel art, especially since different elements appear blurred to different degrees. When I resize my window to make the board smaller (the same size as the previous version), everything looks much better.
* The translucent chests and broken walls: I think this adds unnecessary visual clutter to the board.
* The board feels a lot more cramped now somehow; I'm not sure if it's the way the new crystal ball works, or the double walls, or one of the other changes. It kind of feels as if there are too many things going on for a board this size. It would be cool to be able to select between a few different board sizes and complexities with appropriately adjusted dragon health (e.g. a small board with only a small number and subset of monsters and a weak dragon, a medium board with more monsters and monster types, and a large board with everything -- that would follow the vibe of classic Minesweeper, where the three standard board sizes provide different styles of gameplay).
P. S. Will there be an updated download for the hotfixed new version?
I agree that the remnants of the chests and walls is maybe the wrong kind of addition, but if the rubble becomes a permanent fixture of Dragonsweeper, I think it would be great to have two versions so that adjacent walls form less repetitive detritus.
I love the new Battleship gameplay when it comes to the walls (and I don’t miss the lottery element). Maybe there should be a mix of two- and three-block walls to amp-up that Battleshipness?
The update adds some fun new wrinkles and I also appreciate your having fixed the bug where the game would peg the CPU at 100% whenever the character's XP bar was full.
I'd like to make one small suggestion though: please put an upper limit on the size of the board. Right now it scales to the biggest square that will fit in the window, and when your monitor is as large as mine (2560x1440) that means a lot of tedious mousing back and forth.
Mentioned in the comments of the blog post, but you need to use an http server. (like python, Linux it's: python3 -m http.server).
I also mentioned a speedrun would probably be a lot better with the old version but new marking system (which maybe somebody could splice in if nothing else, though I guess be unofficial probably isn't great).
Over time I was getting better, but the game is really challenging. There are definitely patterns (for example you can be 100% sure one enemy will be surrounded by purple slimes - and this enemy has an useful drop), but there is an rng involved, so it will take some time to adjust to it.
I like how the updated increased the difficulty, I was doing random challenges before because the mechanics are so fun but this is better. I only got to 356 so far, you really can't use any health packs until late game to get the max score it seems!
The new version seems much harder... not that I am complaining. I'm still hooked.I've noticed that when you level up it doesn't fill the new heart, so you level up and have 1 heart missing.
So I noticed the Guardians have tiles on their shields for their quadrants, and that Romeo and Juliet are reflected across the y axis towards each other. I am confused about the minotaurs now though, they seem to face in a direction when you click a tile but I have no idea what it means
Really brain burning and once your understand all the small details it become significantly easier. While early game can be a little reliant on good RNG once you get past the first and only roadblock (finding ???) the rest become significantly easier (thought not finding health scroll is still deadly, unless I am missing something)
(Finally get my first perfect run with exactly 0 HP)
It's RNG if you can clear the board. You need to conserve the healing scrolls for as long as possible to get the most value out of them, which means searching for the money chests and easy to break walls early on. (This is just speculation on my part. Haven't played enough to know if this is exactly the case)
Yo, this game is really good! I would love to see different difficulties tho (maybe make one crazy map that's really hard too with different monsters), I think it's quite hard, so an easy mode would be amazing (less tiles, less punishing). When I was making a game concept, I also came up with an idea to make the game settings customizable with presets, you could apply this to this game as well
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This is a great game which has provided me with hours of entertainment -- thank you for making it!
Here's some feedback about the new version:
Pros:
* New marking method: awesome! So much better than cycling through the numbers.
* Overall, I like that the game is more difficult now. In the previous version, if you don't have bad luck or screw up, you're pretty much guaranteed a perfect score every time. In this version this is more of a challenge. (Some of the difficulty is probably due to me not noticing some subtleties in the patterns; I just figured out something new while writing this comment. :) )
* New level 9 monsters -- yay! It makes guessing harder, and I like the pattern.
Neutral (not sure how I feel about these):
* Identical walls: I liked the unpredictability of the variable walls in the previous version, but maybe this didn't work as well with the adjusted stats.
* New gnome animation and sound: I don't love this, but it does make it clearer how the gnome works.
Cons:
* The board arbitrarily resizing to the window height: this causes the graphics to be antialiased / blurred, which does not flatter the pixel art, especially since different elements appear blurred to different degrees. When I resize my window to make the board smaller (the same size as the previous version), everything looks much better.
* The translucent chests and broken walls: I think this adds unnecessary visual clutter to the board.
* The board feels a lot more cramped now somehow; I'm not sure if it's the way the new crystal ball works, or the double walls, or one of the other changes. It kind of feels as if there are too many things going on for a board this size. It would be cool to be able to select between a few different board sizes and complexities with appropriately adjusted dragon health (e.g. a small board with only a small number and subset of monsters and a weak dragon, a medium board with more monsters and monster types, and a large board with everything -- that would follow the vibe of classic Minesweeper, where the three standard board sizes provide different styles of gameplay).
P. S. Will there be an updated download for the hotfixed new version?
I agree that the remnants of the chests and walls is maybe the wrong kind of addition, but if the rubble becomes a permanent fixture of Dragonsweeper, I think it would be great to have two versions so that adjacent walls form less repetitive detritus.
I love the new Battleship gameplay when it comes to the walls (and I don’t miss the lottery element). Maybe there should be a mix of two- and three-block walls to amp-up that Battleshipness?
Finally I got the max score on the new Dragonsweeper version!
I love this game. I'm having a lot of issues adapting to the new update. But I love this game.
The game is really good! Somee suggestions:
- Maybe displaying current score somewhere on the screen, that would make it easier to understand how to get max points
- A main menu with selecting difficulty levels(that should change field size and dragon hp)
- Ability to spend gold( i guess it's XP) to not only buy character upgrades, but maybe buying some ability or something like that
The new update if fire and the game has great potential, keep up the good work!
The update adds some fun new wrinkles and I also appreciate your having fixed the bug where the game would peg the CPU at 100% whenever the character's XP bar was full.
I'd like to make one small suggestion though: please put an upper limit on the size of the board. Right now it scales to the biggest square that will fit in the window, and when your monitor is as large as mine (2560x1440) that means a lot of tedious mousing back and forth.
nice game and music
It's "d"ebug mode. A cheat code. Not a bug though
How does the gnome work in the new release? What determines, if he teleports away or is caught?
I think it's the same rule as before: he teleports away if there's an un-revealed empty square for him to teleport to.
Never mind. Figured it out.
We are a few players waiting for a stable new version for grinding speedrun again at speedrun.com ! https://www.speedrun.com/Dragonsweeper
Thanks for making the original version still available so we can keep this category on the site.
Sadly, I can't seem to make it work with the downloaded files. On both folders I have the same issue:
Uncaught SecurityError: Failed to execute 'getImageData' on 'CanvasRenderingContext2D': The canvas has been tainted by cross-origin data.
Mentioned in the comments of the blog post, but you need to use an http server. (like python, Linux it's: python3 -m http.server).
I also mentioned a speedrun would probably be a lot better with the old version but new marking system (which maybe somebody could splice in if nothing else, though I guess be unofficial probably isn't great).
Thanks, someone in the speedrun community made a great guide to use python http.server so I can continue grinding the WR in the 1.0 !
I love the new upgrade. made the game more interesting. Thanks!
Nice Job. Like the upgrade. Should consider letting player attempt both versions.
I like how the updated increased the difficulty, I was doing random challenges before because the mechanics are so fun but this is better. I only got to 356 so far, you really can't use any health packs until late game to get the max score it seems!
The new version seems much harder... not that I am complaining. I'm still hooked.I've noticed that when you level up it doesn't fill the new heart, so you level up and have 1 heart missing.
end at 353, it's hard to get a full score
Hey Daniel Benmergui, I think you need to do another hotfix, the Romeo and Juliet thing suddenly only works like half the time
so for the new highest values
11 (mine king) + 10 (mimic) + 9 (Romeo or Juliet) + 16 (two big slimes) + 7 (guardian) + 18 (three minotaurs) = 71
13 (dragon) + 18 (Romeo and Juliet) +10 (mimic) + 14 (two guardians) + 18 (three minotaurs) = 73
10 (mimic) + 18 (Romeo and Juliet) + 24 (three big slimes) + 14 (two guardians) + 6 (minotaur) = 72
800 (eight mines) = 800
hlol
yeah well that's obvious, so I skipped it
the music stops playing after 1 loop? i think the update broke it somehow
edit: it did in fact come back eventually, but it took a while
edit: nope, now it's gone again
Multiple tracks with some down-time between. I agree it sounds like an error at first when the beat starts coming back, but I think it works.
I thought that too but then it kicks back in and is all the sweeter. Great music
What just happened? I was playing when suddenly the mimic went from 11 to 10, the mine king went from 10 to 11, and the dragon went from 12 to 13
Surprise hotfix!
Also, I noticed that you can select 12 for what you think one of the spots is even though there isn't a p12 monster. what's that about?
Wow thanks for the hotfix, No wonder the Mine King killed me when I had 10 hearts...
I got the first completion of the new dragonsweeper!
...Also I got softlocked into not being able to touch anything, like the crown, Jorge, or monsteromincon, because I took a screenshot
So I noticed the Guardians have tiles on their shields for their quadrants, and that Romeo and Juliet are reflected across the y axis towards each other. I am confused about the minotaurs now though, they seem to face in a direction when you click a tile but I have no idea what it means
Minotaurs seem to always have a chest in the eight squares adjacent to them... And they get mad when you steal their treasure!
It appears the chest is always one of the 3 squares behind them!
Oh that makes more sense...
Okay, two bugs I noticed right away
1. Romeo doesn't have a death animation, unlike Juliet
2. Jorge's dance is very fast, much faster than the origional (bug or feature?)
Great game! Tough at first, but once you figure it out it's great!
free Rats & Joker run:
Got a +1 Heal scroll FC win :)
the rats are now free of tyranny!
I saw the rat pacifist run and wanted to try something similar. Here it is my Bubble pacifist Run:
Yes, it was a lot of trial and error. Yes, it was fun AF.
inspired by another commenter: my own rat pacifist run. be free :)
Awesome idea!!!
amazing game, i got so addicted. Please xpand and do a steam release i will pay money. i luv u
Really brain burning and once your understand all the small details it become significantly easier. While early game can be a little reliant on good RNG once you get past the first and only roadblock (finding ???) the rest become significantly easier (thought not finding health scroll is still deadly, unless I am missing something)
(Finally get my first perfect run with exactly 0 HP)
Top tip: Press the "R" key to restart, without having to reload the whole page.
Great game, learning to play it is just as fun as knowing how to defeat it
Wow, what a great game! If you are adding onto it, it'd be cool to see different levels with varying shape/size.
Excellent and addictive! Beat the Dragon three times so far with a top score of 229. Just can't quite seem to get the order to clear the board.
It's RNG if you can clear the board. You need to conserve the healing scrolls for as long as possible to get the most value out of them, which means searching for the money chests and easy to break walls early on.
(This is just speculation on my part. Haven't played enough to know if this is exactly the case)
300 is my highscore
Yo, this game is really good! I would love to see different difficulties tho (maybe make one crazy map that's really hard too with different monsters), I think it's quite hard, so an easy mode would be amazing (less tiles, less punishing). When I was making a game concept, I also came up with an idea to make the game settings customizable with presets, you could apply this to this game as well
Great game! Love the music and the overall vibe
umm whoops?