Gnome is bugged, once he moves to a tile he removes your mark. So if you cover whole map with ? for example, as soon as you find the gnome once you'll be know where he moves because the mark will disappear.
So…if I spend 2½ minutes doing the mind-numbingly boring task of covering the board in question marks, I can get a slight advantage in a game I usually beat in about 10 minutes?
I’m not savvy enough to make some kind of 10-minute playthrough GIF, but I don’t think that 10 minutes will seem outlandish to anyone who has been playing a couple games a day since Dragonsweeper launched. I’m definitely making more fatal blunders since the update because I have some muscle memory that is no longer helpful, but among games I win, my average is probably about 9:50.
Dunno what to tell you, but I can say that after dinner tonight I respawned the board until I had the Gnome in sight, and I went ahead and spent two minutes covering the rest of board in question marks (the cleared diamond saves the ½ minute) and my takeaway is…
chasing the Gnome is fun!
It’s dumb and silly and awesome. No idea if I will ever do it again, but it’s a lark and I think you for sharing the idea.
It's the first Google result, which is pretty unfortunate. It doesn't even seem to be the only site freebooting the game, so perhaps adding a disclaimer to the itch.io description that this is the only website where the game is officially hosted on would be a good idea, just to clear up confusion for anyone who happens to see it somewhere else.
I love the new update, especially the UI improvements. I might not get all strategies but I think there is more luck involved to know exactly in which tile the Mine King is at the moment when it is possible to kill him (which I find crucial for max. score)
Also, the there is now a small amount of time when there is no music.
- Minotaurs shifted from P7 to P6, replacing Snakes - Guardians made to replace minotaurs as P7 - Walls now always take the same amount of hits and drop the same amount - Dragon decreased from P15 to P13 - Mimic increased from P10 to P11 - Mine King decreased from P11 to P10 - Mines now drop 3 gold instead of 2 - Added Romeo and Juliet as P9 - Now start with one orb - Increased starting reveal area - Remains of chests and walls now shown
Enemy Rules: - Mine King(10) will always spawn in one of the corners and drop the scroll that removes the mines. - Rats will always face towards the Rat King(5), who drops the scroll that shows all rats - Purple mage(1) will always spawn on the edge and has 5 Purple Slimes(8) surrounding it, drops the scroll that shows all slimes - Gargoyles(4) will always spawn in pairs and face towards each other - 2 Watchers(5) will spawn and hide surrounding tiles in a range of 2 into ? - Mimic(11) will drop 11 gold, and will show in tiles. - Romeo(9) and Juliet(9) will always spawn in the same place reflected in the y axis - A Guardian(7) will spawn in each quadrant of the map, which is shown on their shields - Walls spawn in pairs and will take 3 hits to destroy, drop 1 gold - Gnome teleports to an empty space when found, can only be killed when no empty spaces remain - Minotaurs(6) and chests will spawn together, the chest spawning in the 3 spaces behind the minotaur
Another future feature request suggestion, following up on various ideas for different difficulties: a custom mode where you can select a board size, monster population, and dragon HP (within certain size limits), and then export the configuration as a string that another player can import. A lot of these combinations would probably be silly and not playable, but it would be cool if people could create and share the interesting ones.
Since the update I can't clear the board - I'm always just a bit shy of health for being able to level up one last time! I'm probably doing something wrong, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is... are there secret ways to get more hearts? (Besides the lvl 9 skelly guys, whomst I love.) Still a very fun game!
Have you tried it since the Mine King was re-re-adjusted to HP 10? It was much harder when he was HP 11, but now it seems comparable to the old version in difficulty.
My general strategy: in the early game, I try to open as much of the board as possible (so I favour multiple small monsters over one big one, and favour revealing squares over clearing known monsters). I never waste a heart -- if I have no other safe moves, I punch a wall. I try to reveal the monsters with the special scrolls (especially the Mine King) as soon as I can -- exploring the board helps to narrow down where they are. The sooner I can blow up the mines, the sooner I can get their points and make the board safer to clear! In the end game I try to clear the monsters largest first, so that I can use up exact numbers of hearts before levelling or using a heart scroll. The walls are more predictable now; in the previous version I would clear them before the lowest-level monsters, but now I leave them for last.
Maybe a dumb question but running the downloaded version gives me "Uncaught DOMException: The operation is insecure" on Firefox and fails to load. How can I run this game offline? Thanks
For security reasons, browsers impose limitations on pages that you open locally through your filesystem. You have to use a local webserver. There are many options for setting one up permanently, but if you have Python 3 installed a very simple temporary option is to run python3 -m http.server inside the directory. Tested on Linux; should work as-is on Mac; on Windows you may need to add the Python executable to your path or use the full path to it.
Either the 10 HP mine king makes a huge difference or the latest update rebalanced something else -- I'm suddenly regularly able to clear the board again. :D
There once was a brave-hearted knight, Who searched dungeons by numbers of fright, Each flagstone he'd tap, Would avoid deadly traps, 'Til the dragon arose to fight!
I really enjoy the game. I need to ask, is this a bug or a feature? It is boring to set all the question marks, but pretty OP. It was on some previous versions too, when there was no question marks.
Another new version! Seems like the difficulty is better now. The original version was generally too easy, unless you got unlucky in the first few moves (not such an issue now that it takes less gold to level up, early on). I'm not actually convinced the second version could be beaten - it was still easy to slay the dragon, but having tried in cheat mode just to confirm it, I'm not sure it was possible to clear the entire map (maybe I was just missing a trick). With the latest version, it definitely is possible, and with a heart scroll to spare. I'm not sure Romeo and Juliet add much to the game. I guess the idea was to provide an extra source of hearts late in the game, without making them too abundant early on, but because they're such high level monsters (9), you're almost just spending a heart to gain a heart.
That's not the version I meant. There was (briefly) a version very similar to the current one, but with a maximum score of 360 (not 361). I think Daniel has tweaked things a couple of times, without announcing it to anyone.
Loved it! Could not stop playing until the dragon was slayed. Both this game and Fidel made me think of Diabolika (by Derek Yu and Jon Perry). Not sure if that was a conscious inspiration.
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.
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Ese gnomo es pariente del de Fidel Dungeon Rescue
Benmergverse confirmed
es EXACTAMENTE el mismo
It looks like the happiness system is not always producing the desired result.
Below is one of the examples. I've also met non-paired gargoyles and walls
Yes, I will have to give it more compute.
Great game. 1.1.5 seems pretty hard to 100%.
Gnome is bugged, once he moves to a tile he removes your mark.
So if you cover whole map with ? for example, as soon as you find the gnome once you'll be know where he moves because the mark will disappear.
https://imgur.com/a/7ideVu0
So…if I spend 2½ minutes doing the mind-numbingly boring task of covering the board in question marks, I can get a slight advantage in a game I usually beat in about 10 minutes?
Show me how you beat it in 10 minutes
I’m not savvy enough to make some kind of 10-minute playthrough GIF, but I don’t think that 10 minutes will seem outlandish to anyone who has been playing a couple games a day since Dragonsweeper launched. I’m definitely making more fatal blunders since the update because I have some muscle memory that is no longer helpful, but among games I win, my average is probably about 9:50.
press X to doubt
Dunno what to tell you, but I can say that after dinner tonight I respawned the board until I had the Gnome in sight, and I went ahead and spent two minutes covering the rest of board in question marks (the cleared diamond saves the ½ minute) and my takeaway is…
chasing the Gnome is fun!
It’s dumb and silly and awesome. No idea if I will ever do it again, but it’s a lark and I think you for sharing the idea.
I just beat it in under 7 minutes. The older version was easier and people could probably get this time regularly with a perfect score.
I dont have time for that.
Good catch
Hey Daniel this is super awesome. Literally. I'm in awe.
There's [redacted], is that legit or do we need to get the pitchforks out?
Not legit but lets just not give it attention
It's the first Google result, which is pretty unfortunate. It doesn't even seem to be the only site freebooting the game, so perhaps adding a disclaimer to the itch.io description that this is the only website where the game is officially hosted on would be a good idea, just to clear up confusion for anyone who happens to see it somewhere else.
I saw you published v1.1.15 but I think the guardians are still bugged.
Will fix
very unique take on minesweeper, really enjoyed it!
Finally!!!
Nice! Any tips for the full clear? I haven't pulled it off since the update even though I could get it every time in the last version.
Request: could I be blocked from misclicking on a tile i've labeled as having a tougher monster than my own current health
I love the new update, especially the UI improvements. I might not get all strategies but I think there is more luck involved to know exactly in which tile the Mine King is at the moment when it is possible to kill him (which I find crucial for max. score) Also, the there is now a small amount of time when there is no music.
is there a way to make romeo and juliet be together?
This gives me an idea...
Changes from update:
- Minotaurs shifted from P7 to P6, replacing Snakes
- Guardians made to replace minotaurs as P7
- Walls now always take the same amount of hits and drop the same amount
- Dragon decreased from P15 to P13
- Mimic increased from P10 to P11
- Mine King decreased from P11 to P10
- Mines now drop 3 gold instead of 2
- Added Romeo and Juliet as P9
- Now start with one orb
- Increased starting reveal area
- Remains of chests and walls now shown
Enemy Rules:
- Mine King(10) will always spawn in one of the corners and drop the scroll that removes the mines.
- Rats will always face towards the Rat King(5), who drops the scroll that shows all rats
- Purple mage(1) will always spawn on the edge and has 5 Purple Slimes(8) surrounding it, drops the scroll that shows all slimes
- Gargoyles(4) will always spawn in pairs and face towards each other - 2 Watchers(5) will spawn and hide surrounding tiles in a range of 2 into ?
- Mimic(11) will drop 11 gold, and will show in tiles.
- Romeo(9) and Juliet(9) will always spawn in the same place reflected in the y axis
- A Guardian(7) will spawn in each quadrant of the map, which is shown on their shields
- Walls spawn in pairs and will take 3 hits to destroy, drop 1 gold
- Gnome teleports to an empty space when found, can only be killed when no empty spaces remain
- Minotaurs(6) and chests will spawn together, the chest spawning in the 3 spaces behind the minotaur
Another future feature request suggestion, following up on various ideas for different difficulties: a custom mode where you can select a board size, monster population, and dragon HP (within certain size limits), and then export the configuration as a string that another player can import. A lot of these combinations would probably be silly and not playable, but it would be cool if people could create and share the interesting ones.
Since the update I can't clear the board - I'm always just a bit shy of health for being able to level up one last time! I'm probably doing something wrong, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is... are there secret ways to get more hearts? (Besides the lvl 9 skelly guys, whomst I love.) Still a very fun game!
Have you tried it since the Mine King was re-re-adjusted to HP 10? It was much harder when he was HP 11, but now it seems comparable to the old version in difficulty.
My general strategy: in the early game, I try to open as much of the board as possible (so I favour multiple small monsters over one big one, and favour revealing squares over clearing known monsters). I never waste a heart -- if I have no other safe moves, I punch a wall. I try to reveal the monsters with the special scrolls (especially the Mine King) as soon as I can -- exploring the board helps to narrow down where they are. The sooner I can blow up the mines, the sooner I can get their points and make the board safer to clear! In the end game I try to clear the monsters largest first, so that I can use up exact numbers of hearts before levelling or using a heart scroll. The walls are more predictable now; in the previous version I would clear them before the lowest-level monsters, but now I leave them for last.
Maybe a dumb question but running the downloaded version gives me "Uncaught DOMException: The operation is insecure" on Firefox and fails to load. How can I run this game offline? Thanks
For security reasons, browsers impose limitations on pages that you open locally through your filesystem. You have to use a local webserver. There are many options for setting one up permanently, but if you have Python 3 installed a very simple temporary option is to run python3 -m http.server inside the directory. Tested on Linux; should work as-is on Mac; on Windows you may need to add the Python executable to your path or use the full path to it.
Either the 10 HP mine king makes a huge difference or the latest update rebalanced something else -- I'm suddenly regularly able to clear the board again. :D
Whoa, whatever you're doing with revising mechanics and, specially, adding new music, KEEP DOING IT!!
Super sick game! Love a good iteration on a classic :)
This is a minstrel's song to minesweeper.
There once was a brave-hearted knight, Who searched dungeons by numbers of fright, Each flagstone he'd tap, Would avoid deadly traps, 'Til the dragon arose to fight!
finally got 361!!! love the new version, It's much more difficult to get the max score now.
I did it!! What a great game!!
Conquered the new version! interesting update. Love the crown
why did the music just end like that
I really enjoy the game. I need to ask, is this a bug or a feature? It is boring to set all the question marks, but pretty OP. It was on some previous versions too, when there was no question marks.
wow that's cracked haha
Another new version! Seems like the difficulty is better now. The original version was generally too easy, unless you got unlucky in the first few moves (not such an issue now that it takes less gold to level up, early on).
I'm not actually convinced the second version could be beaten - it was still easy to slay the dragon, but having tried in cheat mode just to confirm it, I'm not sure it was possible to clear the entire map (maybe I was just missing a trick). With the latest version, it definitely is possible, and with a heart scroll to spare.
I'm not sure Romeo and Juliet add much to the game. I guess the idea was to provide an extra source of hearts late in the game, without making them too abundant early on, but because they're such high level monsters (9), you're almost just spending a heart to gain a heart.
The second version is definitely possible to clear. Max score 303. Theres a couple strats that make it pretty easy to clear with a little luck
That's not the version I meant. There was (briefly) a version very similar to the current one, but with a maximum score of 360 (not 361). I think Daniel has tweaked things a couple of times, without announcing it to anyone.
very good
Loved it!
Could not stop playing until the dragon was slayed.
Both this game and Fidel made me think of Diabolika (by Derek Yu and Jon Perry). Not sure if that was a conscious inspiration.
I've been had
This is awesome!
I just finally got my first 303
Did the mimic and the mine king swap HP again? 🤔
Dragon did not go up an HP... Dragon used to be 15, now he's 13.
It was 12 for a short time, too.
Finally got it! Update definitely increases the difficulty level by quite a bit for a max score.
Like the update. I do wish there were some difficulty levels, but plenty of challenge and enjoyment as is. Thanks for your work.
Mixed feelings about the update.
Is it possible to have the og version and current one as separate game modes?
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