A tutorial you play, not one you read
A creator recorded fourteen minutes of themselves playing the demo. They said the mechanics seemed solid, then spent most of the video not knowing what was happening. Someone else, who already knew hanafuda, wrote that the explanations were too thin for anyone who didn't.
Both were right, about different things. So the demo now opens with the tutorial.
- Eight steps, on a real table with real rules — nothing is faked
- It hands you one card at a time and tells you why that one
- Skippable from the very first screen, and Settings brings it back whenever you want
It starts where it should have started: forty-eight cards, twelve months, four to a month, no numbers and no suits. Then matching by month. Then the part nobody could work out — that after you play a card, one more flips off the deck by itself.
What else changed
The score readout was wrong
The multiplier was printing its own multiplication sign on top of the separator, so a line could read "130 × ×53". It was in the game, in all eight store screenshots, and in the trailer. All three are fixed.
Winning sounded like getting hit
A wooden impact sample was playing on good news. Big hands, multipliers and boss wins now use cards, chips and a bell. The impact sound stayed where you really are being hit: the police raid, losing a pot, the debt collector at the door.
Your hand sat in the order it was dealt
It's sorted by month now, so cards of the same month stand together and your eye stops hunting.
I said the table waits, then counted your turns
There is no clock. There is a fixed number of plays per night, and nothing said so. The tutorial now says both, and the counter shows a number instead of asking you to count dots.
You couldn't tell what you were working toward
Your debt now reads "Clear this and you're out", and it changes the moment you do. Scoring sets show progress as numbers, not just pips.
And the rest
- The pacing had gotten sluggish — fixed
- Score popups stacked on top of each other — fixed
- The deck thickness bar would flash across the screen — fixed
- The reset button in Settings didn't actually bring the tutorial back — fixed
- The "which card do you want" banner covered the scoring sets you needed to decide — moved
- The chosen stakes level looked identical to the unchosen one — now it doesn't
Thank you
Every one of these came from someone who played the demo and said what was wrong. Working alone, you stop seeing this stuff. The demo is free and it's in fifteen languages. If it loses you somewhere, I'd rather hear it than not.
— Moon, solo dev