How I made my game easier to understand

For those that are unaware, I have been working on a prototype for a tactical deckbuilder for about two months now. The game started as a gambling-based deckbuilding game, and evolved slowly to what it looks like now. I've been advancing the game loop and should be able to start polishing a demo in the next few weeks.

If you're curious as to what the game looks like now, feel free to give the prototype a try!

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have indicators for upcoming enemy actions. You can see a similar system in place in Into the Breach and Slay the Spire, and developers from both games have discussed the importance it had for the players to be able to plan out their moves. With a system derived from both of those games, I knew that was something I needed to adopt.

However, I needed to lean towards the ITB model, as enemies could target multiple spaces, so players would need to react to multiple damage sources at once. As such, I developed an incoming damage indicator, seen above as the red square.

While I thought this would make the game easier to understand, it actually lead to confusion for some players, who couldn't understand why I was showing damage that wasn't impacting units, or why the health bars were not reacting to them. There were also some other issues, like the turn order, set actions, and cards being drawn and discarded, that confused players.

In the updated version, I decreased the size of the indicators, and programmed them to blink on and off. This helped players recognize that it was a future action, versus one that had already happened.

I also added a counter for the draw and discard pile, and an action-order panel in the top corner that indicated how many actions the player had logged, and what order they would be performed in.

I still need to do more playtesting to see how the changes have worked, but I'm excited to see what players think!