Minesweeper 16/48

[Blerkotron]

I played it. It's everything that Minesweeper should be, nothing more, nothing less.

Okay, maybe two things:

1) When you write your next game, think about adding some music. In the classic times we had mostly silence and some farts from beeper in Spectrum games but today if you want to do something really nice, music is must-have.

2) Heroes mode is a bit hard and unfair - there are small separate areas and you have to do too much completely wild guesses.

Music I would definitely like to look into, but that needs me to learn more about interrupts and to actually find someone with some musical talent (I have none!) so it'll either be a later update or the next game, I think.

Heroes mode was actually quite difficult to do - first to find sprites which actually worked okay as levels and then to balance how many mines should go into each. There are still some corners which are basically luck, I agree, but I tried to make those levels a little bit easier (perhaps not quite easy enough).

Nice work, I've had a bit of fun with this, although the Large map in Hard mode seems to be impossible to get going.

On the earlier versions of Windows Minesweeper (not sure about any of the later ones), it was rigged so that the first square you clicked was always blank.

Thanks! I've heard the comment about 'rigging' that first click a couple of times now, so I might take a look at it as an option for the 48K version. It should be quite straight-forward to do and the levels usually generate pretty quickly so hopefully there wouldn't be too much of a delay after that first click.


Incidentally I found and fixed the bug that [mention]MatGubbins[/mention] reported earlier (accidental SBC instead of SUB so occasionally the carry flag interfered with the result) so that'll be okay in the next version.

[Ralf]

Music I would definitely like to look into, but that needs me to learn more about interrupts and to actually find someone with some musical talent (I have none!) so it'll either be a later update or the next game, I think.

AS for music you could try to ask a man called Yerzmyey. He's on old World of Spectrum, he's very talented and did music for a lot of games in the past.

Or you can take some existing music. Actually there is a big archive of tunes written for Spectrum in the past and most of them were never used in any game. Most of them were done in the 90s in Russia and you can in practice consider them a kind of "abandonware".

[RMartins]

You can always "rig" the first click, just to open a 3x3 tile area centered around the tile the user clicked, without blowing up, hence avoiding to need to clear your designs in that area. Next clicks would work as usual.

However, for the "Hero Levels" you will still have trouble with very dense areas, since MineSweeper was not created with that kind of clustered areas in mind, since it does not work well with closed or walled areas, because then it becomes a lucky guess game, instead of a masterful click game

[Blerkotron]

Update time!

I've just released v1.0 - a couple of tweaks and bugfixes, and I've also implemented the much-asked-for "can't lose on your first click" mode. Downloads are again available from my itch.io page:

https://blerkotron.itch.io/minesweeper

Thanks to everyone who tried the first version, I've had some lovely feedback and it's great to see people actually playing and enjoying it.

[MatGubbins]

Downloaded the new version and it looks as if the flag bug has been solved. Brilliant!

When the minefield has been solved it is very easy to press another key and return to the menu without seeing the final score flash. Would it be possible to have the score flash for a few seconds without accepting a key press and then afterwards accept it, that way the player knows they have won and look at the map for a few seconds.

Edit: OK, I've played it again with the sound on (I usually play puzzle games with sound off) and it emits a noise when won.

[Blerkotron]

I've done that a few times too but just thought it was me being cack-handed. I'll put a bit of a pause in there for the next version.

[RMartins]

When we fail, and blow up a mine, it would be nice to uncover the rest of the level, like the windows version does, so we can see where we went wrong.

Is the Blocky Avatar from "Byte Me" sprites by Craig Stevenson ?
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinc ... eSheet.png

[Blerkotron]

Yes, Craig is @hot_piping.

I've added revealing the level to the wish list, it should be very straight-forward to do.

[Morkin]

Very nice conversion, slick and polished, pretty cool if it's your first machine code game. I'm very tempted to stick this on my DS for long train/coach journeys..

I was a bit wary of downloading it at first, as you can get drawn into playing this b*stard for hours..!

[redballoon]

Is the Blocky Avatar from "Byte Me" sprites by Craig Stevenson ?
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinc ... eSheet.png

Hello. That is me. As is @hot_piping.
Yes, they were never used in “Byte Me” and had been out of work until Blerk’s Minesweeper.

[RMartins]

Cool that those graphics have now been used instead of just being lost in the mist.

You might want to correct the entry of the "Byte Me" sprite sheet, and create a new one for this game

[R-Tape]

I've done that a few times too but just thought it was me being cack-handed. I'll put a bit of a pause in there for the next version.

You may know already but I find putting a 'nokey' check first useful:

Code: Select all

	;
anykey:	call nokey
	xor a
aklp:	in a,(254)
	cpl
	and 31
	jr z,aklp
	ret
	;
nokey:	xor a
	in a,(254)
	cpl
	and 31
	jr nz,nokey
	ret
	;