Now, obviously, I'm a demon minesweeper player, and I never screw up, so this niggle is of absolutely no importance to me. But just supposing I were ever to make a mistake…
It would be nice if, when you stepped on a mine, some indication were given of where you went wrong. Ideally, at that stage, the following would be mutually distinguishable:
Empty areas successfully uncovered
Mines correctly discerned
Places you said contained a mine, which didn't
Mines you didn't find
Empty areas you didn't uncover
The mine you trod on
At the moment, 2 and 3 look identical, as do 4 and 5.
It sounds as if you're describing the standard behaviour of Windows Minesweeper. Am I correct?
The thing about my Mines is, it has an undo feature, because that comes as standard when any game is implemented as part of my puzzle collection. I nearly arranged to make the undo feature optional (disabled or enabled by choice of each individual game) on the basis that it didn't seem to make much sense for Mines, but at the last minute I was persuaded to turn Undo into a feature rather than a bug.
Hence, when you step on a mine, you only get told about the one mine you stepped on, which means it hasn't spoiled the rest of the grid for you - so you can press Undo and carry on playing, and the game will keep track of how many times you died. I think this is a much better response to death than to declare the game completely over.
(In particular, I might have considered that mechanism in itself to be an adequate solution to the problem of 50-50 guess sections if I'd thought of it first. I'm glad I came up with the intelligent generation algorithm first instead.)
drswirly suggested at one point that perhaps there could be a limit on the number of times you were permitted to undo your own death - a lives counter, in fact - and after that limit was exhausted the full grid would be revealed à la Windows Minesweeper. Then I could set the limit to infinity (preserving the current Mines behaviour) and you could set it to 1 (reverting to Windows Minesweeper) and other people could set it to somewhere in between if they liked. However, that requires a general configurability interface for the puzzle suite as a whole, which I'm still resisting because it would be so much work...
If you do decide you want to see where the mines really were, there's always the "Solve" option on the game menu. It won't overlay that on your existing position, but you can Undo/Redo to switch back and forth between the two views and compare them.
[Pops to fire up Windows Minesweeper for the first time in months…]
Yes, I'm describing Windows Minesweeper. And probably Minesweeper more generally.
If you don't want configurability, maybe "solve" could show a comparison between where you'd got to before giving up, and the full situation, in the way other Minesweepers do when you die. Then people could choose to see that comparison whenever seemed appropriate — at first failure, or never, or somewhere in between as the mood took them.
Incidentally, as a minor user interface consistency issue, I regard the pencil marks in Solo, locking in Net and flagging in Mines as essentially the same activity: the user making notes to themself while solving the puzzle. It feels just subtly wrong to me that this is achieved using the right-hand mouse button in Solo and Mines, but the middle mouse button in Net.
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Now, obviously, I'm a demon minesweeper player, and I never screw up, so this niggle is of absolutely no importance to me. But just supposing I were ever to make a mistake…
It would be nice if, when you stepped on a mine, some indication were given of where you went wrong. Ideally, at that stage, the following would be mutually distinguishable:
- Empty areas successfully uncovered
- Mines correctly discerned
- Places you said contained a mine, which didn't
- Mines you didn't find
- Empty areas you didn't uncover
- The mine you trod on
At the moment, 2 and 3 look identical, as do 4 and 5.The thing about my Mines is, it has an undo feature, because that comes as standard when any game is implemented as part of my puzzle collection. I nearly arranged to make the undo feature optional (disabled or enabled by choice of each individual game) on the basis that it didn't seem to make much sense for Mines, but at the last minute I was persuaded to turn Undo into a feature rather than a bug.
Hence, when you step on a mine, you only get told about the one mine you stepped on, which means it hasn't spoiled the rest of the grid for you - so you can press Undo and carry on playing, and the game will keep track of how many times you died. I think this is a much better response to death than to declare the game completely over.
(In particular, I might have considered that mechanism in itself to be an adequate solution to the problem of 50-50 guess sections if I'd thought of it first. I'm glad I came up with the intelligent generation algorithm first instead.)
If you do decide you want to see where the mines really were, there's always the "Solve" option on the game menu. It won't overlay that on your existing position, but you can Undo/Redo to switch back and forth between the two views and compare them.
Yes, I'm describing Windows Minesweeper. And probably Minesweeper more generally.
If you don't want configurability, maybe "solve" could show a comparison between where you'd got to before giving up, and the full situation, in the way other Minesweepers do when you die. Then people could choose to see that comparison whenever seemed appropriate — at first failure, or never, or somewhere in between as the mood took them.
Incidentally, as a minor user interface consistency issue, I regard the pencil marks in Solo, locking in Net and flagging in Mines as essentially the same activity: the user making notes to themself while solving the puzzle. It feels just subtly wrong to me that this is achieved using the right-hand mouse button in Solo and Mines, but the middle mouse button in Net.