The tutorial isn't that great, it took me a few minutes to figure stuff out.
Create an account and click the learn/tutorial button. Then in your inventory/loadout screen, you can buy stuff from the 'VBOX' on the upper left, and they will appear in your inventory right next to the VBOX. You start with three Attacks in your inventory; click on them and then click on the slots to equip them onto your three ships. Then click ready in the lower right to begin battle.
In battle, you click 'Attack' and then click the enemy ship to use it on. When you aim all three ships, click ready to do a turn.
UI improvements could be used to make this more clear. When I click Attack in battle, it should prompt me for a target. On my first turn I clicked Attack and nothing happened in the UI, so I just clicked 'Attack' for all three ships, assuming they would target themselves, and thus I ended up wasting a turn.
In the inventory/loadout, there are a few paragraphs but you can use an overlay with hints to show the information. On older versions of Android when you set up the phone and went to the homescreen for the first time, it had a translucent overlay with arrows pointing to UI elements and snippets of text saying what they do. So put an overlay on the inventory with a dismiss button, and then keep the current paragraph of text around in case the user missed anything. An overlay can visually and very quickly tell me to 1) buy stuff from the VBOX 2) combine it in the inventory (if desired) and 3) move it to a ship. Drag-n-drop would be nice too if you could implement that - it's more natural and users are pre-trained to do it on mobile devices like tablets, and that training has crossed over to computers too.
It could also be nice for the VBOX and inventory and ships to be more separated with whitespace or outlines.
Also the 11 character password requirement is stupid. I tried using password as my password because I don't give a shit if this account gets hacked and I don't want to have to remember another password or clutter my password manager with entries that I used one day and never again. Please let me do that.
You could also be more forthcoming with what 'b's are. I start with 18bs, how do I get more? Will I have to pay real money, do I get them via battle, etc.
Almost 10% of males (= almost 10% of the people who will try this game) are red-green colorblind. You should add a setting for colorblind mode and have it swap to a safe palette (or redesign the base palette away from RGB). Make the setting visible when an account is created so colorblind people don't miss it. http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/colorblind/https://davidmathlogic.com/colorblind/
Contrast is low IMO, the sidebar on the right could be more clearly separated and buttons could be more clearly separted from the background (the green-outline black-fill ready button on the inventory screen especially, though the dark gray buttons on the inventory were also hard for me to see well until I turned off night mode).
Thanks for your feedback and taking the time to write our your experience.
`b`s (the ingame currency) only last for as long as each game. For more info about almost anything you can mouse over it and a description appears in the info pane.
Colourblindness is going to be a tough one! We would like to have specialised icons for each item but for the minute we just have programmer art.
Create an account and click the learn/tutorial button. Then in your inventory/loadout screen, you can buy stuff from the 'VBOX' on the upper left, and they will appear in your inventory right next to the VBOX. You start with three Attacks in your inventory; click on them and then click on the slots to equip them onto your three ships. Then click ready in the lower right to begin battle.
In battle, you click 'Attack' and then click the enemy ship to use it on. When you aim all three ships, click ready to do a turn.
UI improvements could be used to make this more clear. When I click Attack in battle, it should prompt me for a target. On my first turn I clicked Attack and nothing happened in the UI, so I just clicked 'Attack' for all three ships, assuming they would target themselves, and thus I ended up wasting a turn.
In the inventory/loadout, there are a few paragraphs but you can use an overlay with hints to show the information. On older versions of Android when you set up the phone and went to the homescreen for the first time, it had a translucent overlay with arrows pointing to UI elements and snippets of text saying what they do. So put an overlay on the inventory with a dismiss button, and then keep the current paragraph of text around in case the user missed anything. An overlay can visually and very quickly tell me to 1) buy stuff from the VBOX 2) combine it in the inventory (if desired) and 3) move it to a ship. Drag-n-drop would be nice too if you could implement that - it's more natural and users are pre-trained to do it on mobile devices like tablets, and that training has crossed over to computers too.
It could also be nice for the VBOX and inventory and ships to be more separated with whitespace or outlines.
Also the 11 character password requirement is stupid. I tried using password as my password because I don't give a shit if this account gets hacked and I don't want to have to remember another password or clutter my password manager with entries that I used one day and never again. Please let me do that.
You could also be more forthcoming with what 'b's are. I start with 18bs, how do I get more? Will I have to pay real money, do I get them via battle, etc.
Almost 10% of males (= almost 10% of the people who will try this game) are red-green colorblind. You should add a setting for colorblind mode and have it swap to a safe palette (or redesign the base palette away from RGB). Make the setting visible when an account is created so colorblind people don't miss it. http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/colorblind/ https://davidmathlogic.com/colorblind/
Contrast is low IMO, the sidebar on the right could be more clearly separated and buttons could be more clearly separted from the background (the green-outline black-fill ready button on the inventory screen especially, though the dark gray buttons on the inventory were also hard for me to see well until I turned off night mode).