Hey, you wanted to focus on the onboarding, so I took a sort of stream of consciousness notes about things that confused me during and after the tutorial, hope this is helpful ;)
1. First panel
- What are Acts in gameplay terms?
- “Bring opponent’s HP down to 0”, ok, seems obvious.
- Why do I need to know about status effects right now?
2. Second panel
- Seems superfluous at this point, I can figure out character differences when I start playing for real
3. Third (?) panel
- Drop “Unless otherwise specified”, e.g. “Most attacks can only hit opponent right in front of you”
4. Got a bit lost/overwhelmed on a screen introducing timeline, then I clicked a card and shit started happening, I didn't really register what was going on.
5. What is this big sword in between characters? Is it enemy's intent to attack?
6. I still don't get this timeline thing
- There is much going on the screen, it took me a while to realise actions are previewed on a timeline when I hover over a card
- I also failed to understand at first which part of the timeline is mine and which is the opponent's
- Why are past actions in the timeline displayed? What is their relevance now?
- Tooltips on a timeline introduce new terms, not covered by the tutorial. It seems it's a very convoluted description of an alternating turn order?
7. Now I'm supposed to learn about Stunning but I still don’t understand all the previous stuff 😅 (actually I didn't figure out stun mechanics until the end)
8. Card UI
- tooltips on top of the screen are hard to connect with what they refer to on the card
- I think I'd like to have an individual tooltip for every icon on a card or maybe a text description of what exactly the card does.
- I don't think that tutorial covered stamina costs and how is it replenished (maybe I missed it though)
9. I sort of got the gist of how the game plays in the free play part of the tutorial by playing random cards and seeing what happens. I liked parrying mechanic, but I still didn't figure out how stunning works.
My suggestions:
- allow replaying the tutorial
- I'd use some LLM to proofread tutorial content, simplify language, try to reorder and reframe things
- start with smaller, curated set of simpler cards. You start alright with 2 cards in hand that allow forward and backward movement but then jump straight to 6 with a variety of effects.
- player and enemy sides of the timeline should be more visually obvious
Overall, the game looks really interesting, I was drawn to a novelty factor of mechanics, though I still don't get it 100%. Its great that you've put so much work into the tutorial, I think with some iteration it can work well.