Ok, so I played the game for a couple of hours. I may repeat what has already been said before.
Alright, here we go, in no particular order...
First of all, the game has a nice board game feel to it. Like you mentionned earlier, it feels like some board game from the 20's that you've dusted off from your grand-parent's attic. The game doesn't play quite like a board game but it still has the same vibe.
The description of the zone where you are should be made clearer, either place don a card like the rest of the texts or simply made bigger and clearer. All text is easy to read ecept the description of the selected region
You definitively have to scroll the window faster. It's not that bad at first but the more you play, the more you want to explore the board and it gets irritating.
I think the HUD (GUI if you rather say) takes too much place. You need to focus our attention on what is going on in the board, not to show us the girl cards. I say, ttry to compact the girl card section to half it's size. Perhaps placing them half piled up would do the trick. In all cases, we have too much focus on the unuseful info when we are browsing the board. Other wise, it's ok.
The mini-games (Taunt, expose, fib, etc...) are either too easy or too random. Sometimes you feel like you are being given the answer too eaisly, other times you jsut don't know what to do.
Taunt: The taunt game is quite interesting, yet I don't feel like I really know what I'm choosing. Perhaps there is a way but I can't seem to figure it out by myself. Perhaps you could think of a more interactive way to use the concept. Perhaps make the player select the words he want to use in a taunt, a bit like the expose game. You use the skill points you have to concoct a nice taunt that'll throw off the other. Think about a way to make the player decide a bit more about the words used in the taunting.
Expose: Quite easy to play. I say that you should choose more confusing words. try to design your puzzles with two possible sentences. This way, the player will ahve toi think about who is saying the sentence and put it in context rather than just choose the word that fits the most. Also, I'd give the small words to the player right away, like I, AND, IF, THE, etc... Kind of frustrating to use a point to find an I. What you could do is that bigger words cost more points. The player then decides if he wants to guess more small and easy to find words or guess more confusing words.
Fib: I'm not sure how you could make this game less random. I just don't know how I'm suppose to read the cpu mind here. I won the game numerous time (actualy never lost), but it always felt too random. I haven't really thought much about it but maybe you can think of something to remove a bit of the randomness.
Flirt: Interesting but it also feels a bit random. It's like all you need to really have to win is alot of skill points. You just pick up something randomly and it may work. I think I've figured how it actualy worked but it's still not 100% clear to me. Try to make it more obvious. Anyway,I haven't thought much about this game either so I can't really say.
I don't understand what's the use of saving in multiple places since resuming a game loads up the last saved game. Either save only one game or make me choose what game I want to load. Now of course you have the load game option, but the first thing we see it's Resume hence making us think that we may choose something here. Your menu should have New game, Load game and help. You don't need anything more. Since saving the game doesn't mean pausing it, you can't expect the player to remember where he was last time he saved. You have to give him an idea of what he's loading. Your saved game screen shows the time of the game saved, which is quite enough for that, so you ahve to let the player see tahtscreen before he starts. Some player might only play once in a month and play dozen of games in between so you have to help him out with his memory.
When playing, why can we click on teh cards to make the game progress (like parley) but when the segment is over, we can't click on teh last card and we have to click a continue button instead. try to make it more alike. If you sue a system where the player clicks card, keep him clicking cards all the way when they are cards. If you want to use buttons, only use buttons all the time.
When the school closes for the night, i say remove all the pawns from the school that you can't access. there's no point of clicking 10 times on pawns and being told to come back later.
I ahve no clear example of this becuse I forgot to keep a note of it but some prhasing could use some work. If I have a bit of time, I'll post a couple of suggestions. It would also be interesting if you could look for slangs from the 20's and insert them in the game. It would really add to the vibe.
The game's representation is good. the board art is nice, but the closeup of secondary characters, such as Maximilian, could use a bit of work. It's not that bad but it doesn't look as good as the rest. The music is ok though, it pretty much fits the whole game.
if you want to use alot of random stuff in the game, it's ok, but try to show us why it's random. Rolling wirtual dices is alot more staisfying than trying to figure out how the cpu reacted. For instance, if you want to keep the fib game random, you could have a dice system where the player chooses how much points he wants to add to his dice rolls, using his skill points, and then rolls the dice. the cpu rolls his dice and who ever has the highest total wins.
It's an idea but it's just to illsutrate that randomness is easier to understand when you see it happen. Dices are a good way to show the random factor to the player.
I'd also add comfirmation on saving and quitting. Always confimr if the player really wants to save on that spot or wnats to quit. You never know when he may mis-click
We'll that's it for now, if I think of something else, I'll let you know....
Later!
Developer
