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Thanks for the detailed explanation of how you managed to generate unambigious levels. It was very interesting!

I'm having a lot more fun with this than I used to playing regular minesweeper. I do find that after a while I end up basically following the same deduction rules myself as the solver AI you described, so it's not very challenging anymore. But still a great game I can basically play on auto-pilot to keep my hands busy while listening to a podcast. A nice alternative on the Japanese logic puzzle books I usually use for that purpose😅

I did notice a bit of a strange bug (?) where if I beat a puzzle it skips two puzzles again, and I have to go back to the menu to pay the skipped one. It's only a minor inconvenience, but doesn't seem intentional. 

This is a great relaxing game to play on my phone. I'm really enjoying it so far!

@James Gameboy: the issue should hopefully be fixed now in version 1.02

The issue should hopefully be resolved in the latest version (1.02) that I just uploaded to Itch. Please let me know if you still encounter the problem with this version.

Nice! Thank you! I kinda assumed there would be loads of other solitaires on C64 already, but perhaps playing that on home computers didn't catch on until the 90's😅

I asked around with some other developers and it seems there is a likely explanation for it related to loading too many resources up front and exceeding a time limit. The reason why this only occurs on some Playdates might be because they somehow load files slower than usual (maybe having almost full storage makes a difference?).

Anyway, the underlying problem should be easily fixable by changing the way stuff is loaded. I'll will implement that and upload a new version. I'll let you and James Gameboy know when that's ready. Hopefully it'll fix the problem!

Does it also crash right after the logo screen?

When I saw the first two seconds of this on the GMTK stream I immediately knew that this would be the type of puzzle game I'd be into, and I was right. Love it! Great twist on a classic formula. Incredible how many good puzzles (and new game mechanics) you managed to put in within such a short timeframe. Very impressive!

Well, for me or wasn't really a bad thing. It was a kinda fun discovery when I realised that you could move the box around and that there were separate life bars. I think most players will eventually figure out the mechanics when they play for a while.

Liked it! Has a nice back-and-forth gameplay loop that can get pretty tense when exploring a bit too far, time starts running our and you only have 1 health point left. It's nice that the game allows either slowly building up upgrades or taking more risks and getting through the level faster.

Love it! Every path I've tried so far had me chuckling all the way through:)

It took me a little bit to realize what was going and to figure out what was possible on but this is a really clever twist on Asteroid. Very cool! While I'm pretty bad at the game I quite like it!

Thanks! I unfortunately won't be near a PC before the jam deadline (that's why I already submitted this one today) so I can't give any feedback before then, but I like the concept and will make sure to try it out!

Thank you! Happy to hear that! Haha yeah, level 49 is pretty fiendish. I must admit nobody I asked to playtest actually managed to beat it without at least one subtle hint, so I considered making it a bit easier. But I personally liked the it so much I ended up leaving it as-is. Sorry about that😅 But thanks for confirming it's at least possible to solve without any hints😋

Looks like the game managed to trigger "something truly unexpected" then😅

So far I've only seen "regular" game crashes that give a QR code with a stack trace, which can be send to the developer to find the underlying bug. But in this case honestly have no clue what could've caused this or how to figure that out...

If there's anyone reading this who played the game and also has a revA Playdate, could you please leave a comment or send a message on whether you had the same problem?

Ah, that's unfortunate! Does it give you the option to view crash information that you could share? Or does it just hang indefinately on the title screen logo?

Come to think of it, the Wikipedia page I linked to is a bit dry and used a lot of computer science and graph theory jargon. The concepts behind it are not very difficult at all though: they boil down to traversing your grid in a particular way while keeping track of which spaces you've already visited. I would instead recommend to Google for "game pathfinding" or "depth-first search" and look for a more straightforward explanation.

Besides graph search there are also "shortest path" algorithms (like Dijkstra's or A*) that give you the shorter path from A to B that doesn't go through obstacles. You don't really need those because you just want to check if the path exists at all. But if you happen to find a library that does shortest path that will also work, because those algorithms will return an error or report that the "shortest path is infinity long" if no path can be found at all. 

All these algorithms are actually very efficient (execution time "scales linearly" depending on the size of your grid). I recently implemented one in Commodore 64 Basic and that worked fine, so for the Playdate it should definitely not be a problem!

Haha, I have never encountered a case where the other side was not accessible either, so I think that's pretty unlikely to happen given the number of mines and size of the playfield. If you'd really like to prevent this you could solve this via a graph search algorithm. Easiest way to do that besides implementing the search yourself is to take some existing pathfinding implementation (super common in game development for enemy AI etc., so there's probably one for Pulp out there) and make it check if there's a path from entry to exit, where mines are impassible obstacles. If the algorithm can't find any path, then simply regenerate the mines and check again.

I've never played the original (that's the game that originally inspired the concept of Minesweeper, right?) so I don't how it compares. But either way I really like this, especially on the hard difficult: I can usually figure out most of a guaranteed safe path by "feeling around" where the mines are but in hard mode I always have to take a few calculated risks and really factor in the shield as well. 

My high score so far is 685. I wonder if that is any good😅

Thank you so much! I hadn't given that much thought to promotion yet,  I must admit😅 Great tip about the subreddit. I'll definitely post there soon! I'll also check out the podcast, seems like a great way to discover new Playdate stuff.

Really enjoyed it! The puzzles are very creative and have a good difficulty progression: I was never stumped for long but still felt clever for solving them. I also like how the game manages to accomplish this while just sticking to a handful of puzzle mechanics that interact in fun ways. Kinda reminded me of some of my favourite early Game Boy puzzlers like Catrap or Kwirk. I think this is my favourite Playdate game so far!

I recently discovered Catrap and Fire 'n Ice, and they quickly became some of my favourite puzzle games of all time. So when I saw you mention them as influences in your interview with Limited Run I didn't hesitate to order Witch 'n Wiz. I'm about halfway in now and it does not disappoint! I love all the twists to the formula and the clever puzzle design that somehow is never frustrating but still provides a good challenge and makes me feel smart when I figure out the trick to a level. Very impressive! Can't wait for the physical version. Gues I'll have to figure out if my old and dusty NES still works in the meantime😅