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Re: [Enigma-devel] level submission: minesweeper


From: Ronald Lamprecht
Subject: Re: [Enigma-devel] level submission: minesweeper
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:58:56 +0200
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 (Windows/20080213)

Hi,

Andreas Lochmann wrote:
Brian Huffman schrieb:
I have attached an updated version of my minesweeper level.

I have added some features to make sure the level is solvable, and so that the player is never forced to resort to guessing.

- A check is done to make sure that all tiles are accessible from the boundary, without crossing any tiles with mines. No diagonal moves are necessary.

- Mines are never placed along the outer edge. This allows the player to uncover these tiles right away, which presents many more opportunities for locating mines by skill, rather than luck. Essentially this gives the player a lot more information at the start, which makes the level a lot easier; to compensate I have increased the number of mines.

The diagonal move check and the free outer edge have two effects that astonished me while playing this version a few times:

1. The ambiguos mine distributions are drastically reduced as the most likely situations did occur in the neighbourhood of the outer edge.

2. The knowledge of the reachability of all minefree fields helps in most remaining ambiguos distritbutions to decide which way to go. In fact I am able to solve about 90% of the generated difficult levels without using hints.

First I thought that the given outer edge makes the level too easy. But meanwhile I admit that by the increased number of mines and the greater reliability of a fair solution the level gives the player an optimal challenge. It is indeed worth playing it many times :-)

- I have added a hidden area, which has a mechanism to give hints. You hit the st-timeswitch, it traps you behind a door for 10 seconds, then it uncovers a random tile and lets you out.
Ah yes, works great :-)

Three minor things I still see:
- The colours of the fields should be stated somewhere
  in detail, in this dense mine field it might be important
  to know the number behind "deep-red". I suggest a row
  beside the playing area with the field-colors correspon-
  ding to y-coordinate or something similar.
  Whatever suits the design.
- In the "reachable"-function, "m == 10*7" should instead
  be something depending on the number of mines?
  Otherwise I didn't understand this function.
- I don't understand how you distribute the oxyds in the
  end. They should be reachable as well---or the mines
  have to be deactivated in the end.

Another suggestion from my side:

Sometimes it is annoying when the level restarts directly on a false move. It would be nice to be able to analyse ones own mistake. Let the marble resurrect, show the bombs and give the player a document to press Shift+F3 (or Ctrl A) to restart the level.

Greets,

Ronald




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