There's a wonderful game development in Berlin every two months called Talk and Play. I showed my game there last week and my to-do list on Trello shot up from 20 something items to nearly sixty.
The take aways were:
+People like the art style.
+People like the music
-People had trouble understanding the mechanics
-As the game gives you no feedback on cards that reach the top, but do not unlock other cards; There was little sense of accomplishment if you did not happen to use the right card against the right person.
I've made some changes in order to help people understand the mechanics. A simple change was to add a hand sprite behind the cards in the player's hand and to move those cards closer together than the cards on the grid. This makes it clear that the game does not take place on a 3x4 grid, but on a 3x3 grid, the extra row on the bottom is to show you what cards you can place on the grid.
Additionally, arrows on the card light up depending on what column they are placed on. This helps make the connection between the arrows on cards and the directions they can move in.
The gif below should highlight these changes:
The other issue (no sense of accomplishment when you bring a -wrong- card to the top, is a little harder to address.
I want to add a counter to the top of the card game that gets +1 for every card you bring to the top. In order to place to harder cards, this number needs to be increased.
Then I want to reduce the amount of cards that don't unlock further cards at the beginning of the game. This way there's less chance of a player having no sense of progression in the first few interrogations.
I jazzed up the website for the game and sent off a little press announcement, which got me two features so far. The main benefit of this (apart from feeling encouraged), is that a handful of strangers signed up to get an email on release.
tristandahl.co.za/oneshowonly.html
Okay, thanks for making it this far!
-Tristan