You have a 100 cycle count before the dragon is allowed to come after you, that is true for all dragons and it is something that should be taken advantage of. You can download the code and figure out an easy cheat to get across the bridge.

The gold dragon will get to be nearly unbeatable in the 10th or 11th room. I think the red dragon is a little too easy. I plan on making 2 changes tonight - if you are on fire you can still pick up treasure, since at higher levels treasure at the bottom of the screen is almost impossible to get. I will add a randomly placed bucket of water that if you hit it while on fire you will be extinguished and not lose a life. If I have any time after that, I might leave a smoldering heap that emanates a random spark once you have died from burning in the treasure room.

They knew how to make great games back then (though there are many excellent ones today), I do not think mine is nearly as good as the original. But I do like the death animation, for fun try this, collect all the treasures in a room and when the exit door opens stand near it and let yourself get hit with the dragon's fireball, in the treasure room while you are on fire you can run around for a bit, but if you go out the exit door while on fire something interesting. I am thinking of adding a bucket of water in the room so you can put yourself out once maybe twice if you are set aflame in the treasure room.

The infinite lives will go away when I put the score counter in, you will be able to earn more lives in time, the game is still evolving, I just had to take a break from it, I have been working on a dragon fire clone. I need to get the demo part of that out in the next couple days so I can work on the Platformer:SPAAAAAAAACCCEEE game. My head is going buggy, I tried to spell game 3 times and it came out as gmake...

If you did not know - to Save your progress in this game, press the 1 key (Number 1) the word 'Saving' will show up on the screen. When you have save game info there is an area on the title screen that says, "Click here to Restore Game". When a game is restored you map is saves as well as the keys you have collected, you also start with 3 lives (like when a game starts).

Hint - if you want to go up you are going to have to hold both the 'A' and 'S' keys at the same time. You will have to learn how to pulse the wings to get to where you want to go.

It does when the ball does not start off at a really steep angle, what was happening was the ball was hitting the upper boundary and the paddle at the same time, the ball would end up doing a little dance inside of the paddle and then pop out behind it.