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Please do yourself a favor and review the sight effects, both revealing and obscuring ones. The point of this game should be the minesweeper aspect – ie figuring out whether the next step is safe or not. By offering too many reveal options, this is subverted into a boring counting exercise. By using too many obscuring options, you effectively create walls which the player cannot progress through safely. 


In the original game, the kraken enemy worked because you could pinpoint its position reasonably quickly and snipe it safely. Your obscuring enemies are both too varied, too frequent and in the case of the cyclops, too far away to find them naturally. I'd also say too strong in terms of HP, but as a seasoned Dragonsweeper player, I found the various shop items overpowered, to the point of letting me finish the final level with some 10-15 healing items left over. 

Or to rephrase it: minesweeper and dragonsweeper are puzzle games. The entire thrill about puzzle games is that you have to think carefully before making your moves. Designing a roguelike around this which reduces the difficulty through purchasable items is misguided; you won't make a Sudoku master happy by allowing them to make the puzzle easier, instead, you'd make them happy by providing new and interesting constraints they have to work with. 

As it is now, this game has Plants vs Zombies 2 vibes: while the core gameplay works, none of the added features really add to the experience, the opposite, in fact. As a result, this game is more boring and annoying than its predecessor.

(2 edits)

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. The next thing I would like to try is changing the contents of the dungeon and potentially the layout, to create new 'puzzles' instead of relying on items to change the experience since I do think items are too strong overall. Maybe limiting items in general to give have a more curated experience. Have you tried beating the game as the Ascetic? 

I agree with the sentiment that there was a bit too much obscuring going on. I have since changed the cyclops to 8 power and only obscure 8 tiles away. The 12 powered stone watcher has since replaced the cyclops role and is limited to higher level dungeons. We have also updated the obscure effect to be multi-colored so it's easier to identify where and which obscure enemy is nearby!

Not everyone is a hard core minesweeper logician and items are trying to cater to those people. We have gradually toned down items and made them more expensive. If you think the game is too boring and easy we have since added some challenge modes. Can you beat the game with the ascetic on DungeonSweeper+++?