I think this is good, but I feel l like it's missing something? Like, the trouble I've been finding is that I'm often building up straight walls which make it very hard to start chipping in. Particularly when there are still mines on the table.
For the 'Clear Board' stamp, do you need to get the egg, gnome, and all the xp chests before using a single heal scroll? And for 'Rat Pacifist', do you have to spare both the king and the rats?
I just got the Rat pacifist stamp (finally). You can get the king first, but leave the other 13 rats alive. i got the king by randomly clicking at the beginning of the round, then solved the rest of the puzzle from there. It's a different challenge not being able to step on the rats lol
For the Clear Board stamp, there is no direct game rule requirement for to get all the XP before using a single health scroll.
In the current v1.1.18 version of the game, there will always be three +5XP treasure chests in the game.
The theoretical latest that one would have to use a health scroll is when they run out of HP with 11 heart containers. This playthrough would lead to 13 HP left at the end with a max clear. I've never got that much, my record is 10 HP left at the end. So the game is quite generous with extra health for the Clear Board achievement.
The gnome +9XP is very late game, getting that before having to use a health scroll would require tremendous luck. I typically get the gnome XP about the time I have used one or two health scrolls.
Typically I get the egg and one, or if lucky, two +5 XP chests before having to use a health scroll, and do so at about 8 health containers.
The mine king kill is generally easy to get immediately upon reaching lv10, to maximize the health gain there.
Another but subtle change in recent versions (current is the same 1.1.18) gives you way more hearts to play with as rexact points out. Took me a while to realize having been conditioned from earlier versions. Some spoiler space for hints...
When does the game end? ...
No really, how many clicks until the game ends...
Killing the dragon is not the last action you take.
Here's my walkthrough (game v1.1.18), with which max clears are easy. Intense spoiler heavy (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)
- Use Venn diagramming to deduce which cells cannot be empty, to give min-max power levels that a cell must contain. For example, this can be used to deduce the location of a Minotaur's chest, if your game is about to come crashing down:
- 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.
The key is definitively the egg at the beginning! Thanks for the tip. To ensure a max score run, what I do now is to start by randomly clicking in the spots where the egg can be at the very beginning, and if I don't get it, just restart. Once you find it, then you can give that run a try, and it's almost guaranteed to be a max score run :)
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 like Minesweeper, and it's okay that people like this game. I don't think people play traditional minesweeper as seriously as I do, which is why I have a strong opinion. I don't mind that people like this game, but I have a genuine complaint about the the design of the game because I feel its against the spirit of minesweeper itself. Again, I don't really expect people to agree with me, but the arguments given against me fail to respect my own feelings on the game. In fact, most of the points against me make it seem like i'm being unreasonable to articulate the differences in the games I enjoy and this one.
I cant speak for the designer of the game but for me it has more to do of the spirit of lerning patterns and secrets then game of minesweeper.
Its like a 5 minuts game of caves of qud, any other roug or tactics game with random elements. It maks you feal a bit smarter for every “death” and still adding to a new experience the next run.
I don’t think this game in any way, shape or form takeaway anything from the original minesweeper. If anything it may add to it if people find this game intriguing.
And i don’t think the minesweeper mechanics is the core of this game at all… it’s just the thing to deliver the experience of progress.
Not trolling! just telling you my 2 cents! (Probobly worth nothing) 😉
I understand your point, having it called sweeper I was expecting a different type of gameplay. I think you might like Mamano sweeper, it feels much closer to mine sweeper, and also has dragons to slay!
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).
I must be, clearly, Cause the winning strategy that worked for me is very much opposed to how i feel minesweeper should be played and thats okay this game is different but I am an avid fan of minesweeper as a game and this takes away from the design of minesweeper i've come to enjoy. I've watched some videos of other people playing, and the strategy seems more luck based than logic based which is not what minesweeper should be.
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?
Thats meta knowledge, and I think having to lose enough games to understand each of those aspects makes for an interesting dungeon crawler game, but not a very fun Minesweeper game. Forgive me for feeling this way, but this feels like a puzzle game like memory cards and not a puzzle game like minesweeper.
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.
← Return to game
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Love the game! Latest update doesn't seem to allow me to long press to use the labelling any longer... are the controls different now?
I've been playing on my phone primarily, so I can't right-click... hoping I have another option?
Press and hold
Yeah, that used to work for me but doesn't seem to anymore last I tried. I'll try again I guess.
EDIT: Yeah, no luck, it immediately activates instead of letting me hold it.
how low can the fc go?
Absolute gem of a game. Simple mechanics with complex interactions, great challenge level, exactly as much of it as there needs to be. Awesome work.
Fricking love it! Is there any place to find a list of acheivements?
I've gotten the egg, Lovers, 100% clear, no mice. Anything else?
Oh I found it....second page of monsternomicon. Oops.
Awesome! Do you have a twitter handle?
No, but I'm Tomangleberger on IG.
Got so close to 100% - I only needed one more heart to finish a wall rip
Numbers are way too similar, 5 looks exactly like 8
I get you, but it seems to be a web only bug. The DL version works fine
I misunderstood the Lovers Survive achievement at first, and beat the game without killing a single gargoyle. Oops.
I have all the achievements now, but thought I'd share a funny moment.
I think this is good, but I feel l like it's missing something? Like, the trouble I've been finding is that I'm often building up straight walls which make it very hard to start chipping in. Particularly when there are still mines on the table.
Can ye beat a 5:22 3 stamp run??
Super imressive!
Daniel, qué juegazo... pero qué difícil :D
He jugado mucho al buscaminas, pero esto es otro nivel.
La práctica hace al maestro. Me llega a ser más fácil (o llevadero?) que el Buscaminas.
WOW I could not stop playing until four hours later I finnaly beat the dragon! Thanks, amazing work!
Fantastic game. Purchased. Finally got a perfect score today after many games this week. Well done.
This was fun, thank you.
For the 'Clear Board' stamp, do you need to get the egg, gnome, and all the xp chests before using a single heal scroll? And for 'Rat Pacifist', do you have to spare both the king and the rats?
I just got the Rat pacifist stamp (finally). You can get the king first, but leave the other 13 rats alive. i got the king by randomly clicking at the beginning of the round, then solved the rest of the puzzle from there. It's a different challenge not being able to step on the rats lol
For the Clear Board stamp, there is no direct game rule requirement for to get all the XP before using a single health scroll.
In the current v1.1.18 version of the game, there will always be three +5XP treasure chests in the game.
The theoretical latest that one would have to use a health scroll is when they run out of HP with 11 heart containers. This playthrough would lead to 13 HP left at the end with a max clear. I've never got that much, my record is 10 HP left at the end. So the game is quite generous with extra health for the Clear Board achievement.
The gnome +9XP is very late game, getting that before having to use a health scroll would require tremendous luck. I typically get the gnome XP about the time I have used one or two health scrolls.
Typically I get the egg and one, or if lucky, two +5 XP chests before having to use a health scroll, and do so at about 8 health containers.
The mine king kill is generally easy to get immediately upon reaching lv10, to maximize the health gain there.
Another but subtle change in recent versions (current is the same 1.1.18) gives you way more hearts to play with as rexact points out. Took me a while to realize having been conditioned from earlier versions. Some spoiler space for hints...
When does the game end? ...
No really, how many clicks until the game ends...
Killing the dragon is not the last action you take.
Here's my walkthrough (game v1.1.18), with which max clears are easy. Intense spoiler heavy (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)
- Use Venn diagramming to deduce which cells cannot be empty, to give min-max power levels that a cell must contain. For example, this can be used to deduce the location of a Minotaur's chest, if your game is about to come crashing down:
- 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.
The key is definitively the egg at the beginning! Thanks for the tip. To ensure a max score run, what I do now is to start by randomly clicking in the spots where the egg can be at the very beginning, and if I don't get it, just restart. Once you find it, then you can give that run a try, and it's almost guaranteed to be a max score run :)
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!
I recomend 3 stamp run.
Or if yoy want super dificulty the perfect 325 “3 stamp” run.
I thinking I still hanve the Current rekord at 319/325.
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 like Minesweeper, and it's okay that people like this game. I don't think people play traditional minesweeper as seriously as I do, which is why I have a strong opinion. I don't mind that people like this game, but I have a genuine complaint about the the design of the game because I feel its against the spirit of minesweeper itself. Again, I don't really expect people to agree with me, but the arguments given against me fail to respect my own feelings on the game. In fact, most of the points against me make it seem like i'm being unreasonable to articulate the differences in the games I enjoy and this one.
I cant speak for the designer of the game but for me it has more to do of the spirit of lerning patterns and secrets then game of minesweeper.
Its like a 5 minuts game of caves of qud, any other roug or tactics game with random elements. It maks you feal a bit smarter for every “death” and still adding to a new experience the next run.
I don’t think this game in any way, shape or form takeaway anything from the original minesweeper. If anything it may add to it if people find this game intriguing.
And i don’t think the minesweeper mechanics is the core of this game at all… it’s just the thing to deliver the experience of progress.
Not trolling! just telling you my 2 cents! (Probobly worth nothing) 😉
I understand your point, having it called sweeper I was expecting a different type of gameplay. I think you might like Mamano sweeper, it feels much closer to mine sweeper, and also has dragons to slay!
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).
I must be, clearly, Cause the winning strategy that worked for me is very much opposed to how i feel minesweeper should be played and thats okay this game is different but I am an avid fan of minesweeper as a game and this takes away from the design of minesweeper i've come to enjoy. I've watched some videos of other people playing, and the strategy seems more luck based than logic based which is not what minesweeper should be.
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
Thats meta knowledge, and I think having to lose enough games to understand each of those aspects makes for an interesting dungeon crawler game, but not a very fun Minesweeper game. Forgive me for feeling this way, but this feels like a puzzle game like memory cards and not a puzzle game like minesweeper.
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!
finally got there.
Super impressive! Just so you know I can confirm that the times are bugged on my web/android game.
Just made a max score 2 stamp run and it claims I made it in 5 seconds 🤣
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