Praise:
1) The artwork is excellent.
2) I like the music very much as well. You did a good job of selecting music to evoke a mood.
3) The pulsing around Play is a good idea. I just reviewed a game yesterday where it wasn't obvious what the player was supposed to do next. Now Play seems pretty obvious, but establishing the pattern early of drawing attention to the next likely thing the player will do can be helpful.
4) Thank you for including female characters!
5) I like how quickly the story is introduced, but I hope it gets deeper than it at first appears it will.
Constructive Feedback:
1) The name is so generic...
2) The artwork could benefit from a little more contrast to make it feel a little more dramatic.
3) To appear more professional, you should add a Settings dialog to allow you to get rid of Unity's resolution selector ASAP.
4) It would be good if the "Welcome to Spellsword Cards!" dialog popped up before or at the same time as the hero naming screen. On my machine, it popped up almost two seconds later and it was a bit confusing.
5) This dialog was dismissed when I clicked to give the game window focus again. Clicks that give focus should be ignored. Also, I clicked the body of the message box, not the OK button....
6) When I click in the name field, can you highlight all the text so it's obvious it will be overwritten?
7) Why such a short name field? I wanted to name myself Lord Twinkenstein (an old joke) but the last letter was cut off.
8 ) You might want to draw some attention to the fact that other portraits exist. (The arrows could just be framing.) You could consider having a carousel presentation, with one in the middle and then one or more on either side, smaller, dimmer, and lower down, then have them move as the mouse moves over them. IIRC Guild Ward did something like this? It makes it obvious at a glance there are other choices and when the player moves the mouse over to investigate, something happens immediately.
9) For the characters, you might consider adding some more age, face, and body type variations.
10) During the intro, it might be a good idea to pulse a button to click, say "click to continue" or whathaveyou, so the player knows it won't continue on its own.
11) Minor proofreading would help: "The state is self-governed, bordered..." not "The state is self governed bordered..." Having another set of eyes on this kind of thing is very helpful, because we always know what we intend our copy to say and therefore tend to miss minor things.
12) The broken sword looks awfully familiar. Have you been to Gondor lately? :/
13) Instead of "Level Up", how about "Accept?" That way, people know they're committing to what's on the screen right then, rather than kicking off the leveling process.
14) The Confirm button is translucent, which is okay, except you can see the Level Up button behind it.
15) I know it's the way games are made nowadays, especially mobile games, but I'm not a fan of having to be walked through the beginning of the game, click by click. Can you add an Expert mode that allows me to find things on my own?
16) The Council Of Mages "Visit Location" button does nothing.
17) Tooltips of some kind would be very helpful for people using mice. I'm guessing your primary target is mobile, but it's not much work to add them and it would make discoverability much better for PC/Mac/Linux.
18) Scrolling with the mouse wheel in the deck is SO SLOW!
Dragging works okay, but it's not nearly so obvious a thing to do with a mouse.
19) "I'm getting too old for this" is a cliche....
20) It's obvious at the beginning that the enemies are attacking first, only because I've played similar games. Can you have an indicator somewhere that says "Enemies attacking!"?
21) When there's nothing more that can be done, can you flash End Turn?
22) The sound effects are a bit too compressed and sound like they're under water.
I enjoyed the game and wished I had more time to play it!
Developer
