Sorry for the delay, I don't have much free time! :angry: Got a chance to play it and give some feedback.
Download was a bit large. You have a whole JRE in there? So does Spine, and the Spine download is only 15MB. 🙂 I wrote this:
https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Bundling-a-jre
After the download, it updated 50MB, twice. This isn't too big of a deal, but if you could do it in one update that would be better. You want to lower the bar to play your game as much as possible.
Game runs! Boom
I have to create an account to do anything. There are two text fields with no labels which is a bit confusing. Ok, I have to click Sign Up and I fill it out, done... and I'm back to the first sign in screen. I try to log in but put my email instead of my username, ok try some more times and I'm in.
You want people to get into your game with as much ease as possible. 99% of users running your game will need to create an account first, so why not make that the default? Make it clear, fast and easy. When they create an account, log them in right away, no need for them to need to type what they just typed again.
I'm in the game! Do I want to take a tutorial? Sure. The tutorial is nice, it gets me playing cards quickly. I have trouble reading the cards in my hand though. I thought I had to click and hold to read them. It was much later before I figured out that double click gives a fullscreen preview of the card. Even when I do that, I keep thinking to double click again to get rid of the preview, which doesn't. 🙂 Looking at your cards is very common in the beginning. Maybe click and hold would be better to show the preview? Then when dragged (use a tap square), the card would shrink to the mouse position. Actually I just found that right click shows the preview! This should be in the tutorial. Maybe it was, there was once where I clicked twice too fast and accidentally skipped one dialog box. Should definitely make that impossible, eg delay showing the next button for 0.5-1s, especially if showing it in the same position as the last button. Anyway, IMO right click should show the preview on mouse down and hide it on mouse up. This should be much more convenient. I guess double click is for mobile? Makes sense, though right click is sooo much better on desktop. I found I can double click multiple cards, but this does not seem useful at all.
Aaaanyway, I get to the free play part, cast some monsters and attack some things. I don't pay too much attention to my monsters abilities when I cast them, so once they are out I don't actually know what they do. Later I figure out right click and double click show the card, so that helps, but initially I was confused.
I had this happen:
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First that is a flame demon, not a dummy, and second I thought my monsters didn't have summoning sickness (yeah, I play MTG... ask me about all the MTG software I've written...)?
Fireball does not shoot a fireball across the screen? It must!
Ok, so I exit the tutorial. Something (as a true user, I hardly read anything) says build a deck and then fight real people. Ok, so I click my wizzard (you should spell it that way throughout the app if you are a Terry Pratchett / Discworld fan, and if you are not then you must read The Color of Magic right now, but do not watch the movie, ever) and I click build deck like something told me. I don't know what is going on and I have the expectation that I need to build my deck, so I drag some cards from the bottom to the top, all the while thinking man, I wish they gave me a default deck so I don't have to do this. After a while I saw the x/40 was going down and that is when I guessed I was actually unmaking my deck! Ack!
I leave the deck builder and go back to the tutorial real quick to make sure my deck is ok, exit tutorial, then I get a dim screen with a MLW logo. Can't click anything, nothing tells me what is going on. After a while:
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I guess it was hitting the server, though strange it would need to when I just exist. Could use some text so I know what is happening, and an animated wait something so I know it isn't hung.
Now I go to new game, I pick AI because I don't know WTF I'm doing yet, I have to pick a wizzard (even though I only have one), BATTLE! I've got junk, opponent casts some things as I pass a couple turns. He casts electric fence which goes away before I can read it all, good thing that tutorial taught me that I can right click! 😉 Sometimes the opponent casts like 5 things and I can't read them. Unlike monsters, they are gone and I don't know what happened! Maybe I could click it to have more time? I had Backfire out and my opponent triggered it, then he cast about 4 cards while my Backfire was on top, so I had no idea what was going on! In the end I won by casting uh something that doubles fire damage to a monster on his Battery thing, then killing the Battery which killed the wizzard. 😃 I tried to cast 2 double fire things but he countered the second with a trap. Does it stack? Would that have done 4x monster fire damage?
It seems I can only attack the wizzard if I have more monsters then they do?
Your UI is very slick! Overall the app is very well polished, very nice. I like your animations, though sometimes I feel like they should be a lot more over the top and exaggerated, especially the more powerful monsters. I like the gameplay, obviously there are similarities to MTG. Though simplified, I think there can be some nice strategies and it could be quite fun to build decks, collect cards, etc. You have an obvious way to do IAP, ie booster packs. You MUST include the booster pack unwrapping sound. Make a big deal out of getting new cards, it's exciting for the players and can be $addicting$. You have a lot of potential in your app, especially with the mobile market where it is much easier to get started playing (I assume, make it easy!). Keep up the good work! How are things going so far?
Do you use Feedback Friday on Reddit? Might give it a shot.
http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev
