Beta round 1

So the first beta is out and I have received a fair bit of useful feedback. It has been helpful since folks who haven't played it have been without my supervision which is great for discovering messaging issues. I essentially have four that I have been working through: stacks are unclear, order timing is unclear, overflow loss is unclear, and start a new game is unclear. I have the major changes in for addressing them mostly in (the big part for stacks involves adding an animation which is still a little buggy). I have a few other smaller tweaks to strengthen my changes though too.
The choices I made are an interesting demonstration (I hope) of the importance of getting feedback and understanding it rather than straight on implementing it. One of the issues, for example, is the orders. A suggestion in the feedback was " you need a timer". However that already existed in a way (chits appear and move across at key points in an order where stuff happens). The problem was that it A) wasn't clear what the chits were for, and B) it wasn't clear what the hell the chits were (on person thought they were dishes). So rather then pop in a metre or clock persay, I made the appearance of the chits clearer, I have the animate consistently (vaguely imitating a metre, but consistent in appearance), and added a few cues in them for important situations (e.g. changing colour when an overflow is impending to draw attention that there is important info up there).
Beyond that I also spent a day getting the Windows builds updated and getting the Windows Store build specifically in good shape. I thin it is pretty much ready to go. I have also started a new contract so that has unfortunately slowed progress down drastically. I had hoped to have the new beta out today, but it will likely be next week.