Thanks for the feedback! One of the boss's effects is that when a mine explodes, it destroys a 3x3 area around it. As a result, if there is another mine within that area, it creates the chain reaction you experienced. In the early levels, it can take away a maximum of 3-4 lives based on my tests, but it can be fatal in the later ones. The same thing happened to me several times (see my gameplay video). I understand that it is frustrating, and I am open to changing it, which is why I made the game available while it's still in development
It still does not answer the question, how is it possible to open mine on first click with hawk eye.
In your case, there's at least one bug, which explodes not only mines, but any number cell around. This number cells does not spread activation, but counts as damage. As a result, by exploding 7 (61 то 54) bombs i'm getting whooping -22 hit on 3rd level with 10hp at max...
And, yeah, chain reaction should be less destructive. 3*3 damage is overkill. Even activating 3*3 zone around mine is quite painful. I guess, some boss modifier combinations should have more value than each of them apart.
Sorry, I missed the part about opening on a mine. I think I know where the problem is, and I'll try to fix it in the next patch.
Regarding the damage, there is also a boss modifier that increases it by 1, so it would be 2 damage for each mine. If you have the seed, I'll try to confirm if it was present or not. However, if exactly 7 mines exploded, it should have caused 14 damage, not 22. If it was 1 damage for each mine plus each adjacent cell, it would have been much more than 22. Graphically, it is correct that the adjacent cells are damaged; it is part of the malus due to the enlarged explosion effect.
I like the idea of giving weight to each boss modifier to make the resulting stage more balanced. I will work on it, thanks again for the feedback!
Turns out, any boss fight ignores Hawk eye.
Nay, don't have seed. Extra damage is reasonable yet never mentioned. Say, showing "x2 damage" on map screen in tooltip should be enough.
Also, reviving one (or more) of boss modifiers would be great. Say, one for free and more for extra relics\artifacts. This'll make bigger maps more reasonable.
It's not just weighting. It's "chain reaction"=1, "extra bombs"=2, "chain reaction"+"extra bombs"=5. Because it takes a lot of preparations ore one big chunk of luck to survive this combination.
For now, it was not my intention to mention which modifiers were present for each boss in order to keep them unpredictable. Obviously, each combination should be balanced to be as fair as the others, as we already said.
I didn't understand the part about reviving the boss modifiers, could you elaborate? Thanks
Edit: what I could do is to list all the modifiers that could be applied somewhere, like here in the game description, together with other unexplained mechanics :D it's always been a thing to do tbh
Reviving is just a typo. Revealing, i meant.
Boss rooms are surely unpredictable, as they should be in roguelike games. But. With this mindset you'll reach the wall much faster. Floors are small, and that's the problem. The game difficulty rises too fast and more things depend on sheer luck. Not only in rewards, but in mines also. Right now, the only winning strategy is to be damn good at minesweeper. It's not a bad thing itself. It's just that those who are damn good with mines are small in numbers. And the rest of players, who are mediocre, are being overwhelmed too fast to just rage quit the game.
So, you need to make levels bigger to get them involved. And you need to create a few winning strategies for them, to compensate for their lack of skills. With this in mind, you add different builds, like (just press anywhere) tank, (mark me half of mines) ranger and etcetera. Still, you also want to prevent any of this builds from being silver bullet. So, you make boss modifiers like "Rolling snowball" (0 initial damage +1 damage for every exploded mine) or "Rogue earth" (some cells can't be flagged), which target one exact build at the time. But you don't want to just kill player "because of F U, that's why", you wanna let him struggle. Even if player dies, you wanna let him feel "Damn, I was this close to victory". So, you allow players to spend some reward on insight status, which allows to see some of the boss modifiers (and, also, hidden rooms/paths). And add some items that allow players to somewhat compensate the weakness of their strategy. You make the items weak enough to be ignored most of the time, yet common enough to be prepared in floor's time period. Players should feel like they have a chance.
You also want to let experienced players to take shortcuts to higher floors faster. Say, let them have high risk hidden path. You can make it in a funny way. Say, make the first floor to consist of half-solved puzzles. And let player to pass hidden path if he unmarks and explodes 2 marked mines. Or something like that.
Also, can you please make an outline for open cells a bit closer to background color. As it is now, it stands out too much and make it harder to concentrate on numbers. Especially, if one have astigmatism or other health issues.
Oh, revealing the modifiers as a mechanic could be a nice addition, I’ll definitely take note of that.
Regarding the overall flow of the game, I agree that the current pace is too fast, and you don’t have enough room (pun intended) to collect a solid build to proceed more easily. Another idea I had was to have an open map for each level, so if you found the boss, you could keep exploring other areas to collect more resources. I don’t know if you played a version prior to 0.4.0, but the map was also different back then.
I appreciate the overall feedback; some ideas are already somewhat implemented (like hidden paths and puzzles), just not generated in the current release. I know there’s a lot that could be done, and I'm willing to commit to it if the game gains enough traction
