I have tested your game and really enjoyed it. I have recorded it, while speaking out loud, and I am working on a Skill for Claude to analyze my session transcripts and have attached that below.
I would be really grateful if you could test the mechanics of my game as well, you can find the game here: https://itch.io/t/6273292/if-you-test-mine-i-will-test-yours-rabbit-rocket-racin...
Here is the video of me playing your game:
Dominot playtest, my notes
I gave Dominot a 12-minute solo run and recorded my thoughts as I played. Once the loop clicked I genuinely wanted to keep solving boards.
What I liked
- The puzzle loop itself is satisfying once you understand it. From around the 8-minute mark I was narrating moves like "this one needs a three and a one," which is the moment a game stops being instructions and starts being play.
- Strong genre fit. I like board games and puzzle games and Dominot scratches the same part of my brain.
- The progression goal (get to 15, advance) reads cleanly once it's visible. By the end of the session I had figured out the loop and was happy to chase the next level.
- The game let me recover from a bad state. Around 5 minutes in I thought I had broken something, restarted, and worked out on the second try that I needed to update all the pieces before resolving. The retry path was forgiving.
- It held my attention well past my usual stop point. That's not nothing for a prototype.
Where I got stuck
- The intro lost me. In the first minute I was narrating things like "I'm not really sure what that is" and "lost, we are doomed," and at 1:09 I said outright "that intro was a little bit confusing." This felt like a learning problem, not a difficulty problem. The game hadn't told me what I was doing yet.
- I couldn't tell when "resolve" was available. Between roughly 3 and 4:30 I asked "why can I not resolve" three times in a row and never got an answer from the UI. Definitely a learning problem.
- Even when resolve fired correctly, I couldn't tell why. Around 6:30 I said "I don't know why they've resolved, all of a sudden it came up." The mechanic was working but I couldn't connect cause to effect, which is a feedback gap.
- There's a blue indicator I never figured out. At 7:49 I asked "what's that blue one, now I don't know what that means," and at the end of the session it was still unresolved.
- I forgot what wax did and couldn't look it up. Around 10:45 I said "I forgot what wax was," and a minute later "I can't remember what it was, something about replacing something." Once a tooltip is gone, I couldn't get it back. Pure learning friction.
Suggestions
- Replace the opening with a guided first move. Teach the basic loop with one piece on the board before introducing flavor or world setup. The intro felt like flavor first, gameplay second, and I needed it the other way around.
- Make the resolve button tell me why it isn't available. A greyed-out button with a tooltip ("update all matching pieces first" or whatever the rule actually is) would have saved me the entire 3 to 5 minute confusion stretch.
- When a resolve triggers, briefly highlight which pieces caused it. That single bit of feedback would have closed the loop on the 6:30 moment where I succeeded but didn't understand why.
- Add a hover or click-to-inspect on every UI element, especially the blue indicator. If it's important enough to be on screen, it's important enough to label.
- Make mechanic descriptions (wax, etc.) re-readable. A glossary, a hover on the affected piece, anything. Forgetting what a piece does halfway through a level shouldn't end the run.
- A sound volume slider would be nice. Pretty minor, but I noticed it.
Overall
I had a good time, which is the most important thing. The core game is genuinely fun once you're in it, the design is working. The whole experience is essentially gated behind one problem though: I couldn't tell when or why "resolve" worked, which is the central verb of the loop. If you fix that one thing first, I think most of my other complaints will quietly go away with it. Excited to see where this goes.
Thanks for letting me test it.