Some Thoughts From Black Rock!

What I Liked Most

There is a quite a good sensation of sailing I think, with the boat bobbing on the ocean and good ambient sound/music. It looks like there has been some useful iteration on the controls with wind and base velocities taken into account. I don't think this quite as engaging as it could be yet, but it's good that it's being addressed.

The abilities look like they should be fun. I think that the veto ability might be a cool addition. Unfortunately I couldn't consistently use abilities in a fun way when I playtested...

What I Liked Least

As you've already pointed out in your interim support, there's no real sense of how fast your boat is moving when playing. In fact there was one occasion where I thought I should be moving forward but after a while I realised that my boat was drifting backwards!

There didn't seem to be much natural interaction with the other players when I played the game, which reduced the sense of fun.

Overall the game didn't really provide much feedback to the player which is crucial to keeping the player engaged. For example when I first picked up the pad and started playing without knowing which buttons did what, I randomly pressed some buttons and nothing seemed to happen. After a few turns I noticed that when I did this the power bar at the side of the screen reduced in value. But this wasn't immediately obvious and it wasn't immediately obvious where my power had gone.

Ideas For Improvement

I think it's important for the player to be able to tell what the state of the game is at any time. It's fun to know if you're winning or losing. This isn't communicated in any way to the player right now. I'd suggest thinking about how the overall goal of the game is communicated to the player, and how the player measures progress.

I found sailing against the wind frustrating in a way that made me want to stop playing. I wonder if you could turn this around, so that the wind isn't so much a force that stops the player, but one that provides a real boost if you align yourself correctly?

There was some nice ambient music/sound in the game. Sound is a great way to feed back information to the player and engage emotion. It felt like the music happened on some event in the game, but I wasn't sure what. You could possibly build on that; maybe playing happy music when a player aligns with the wind?

From your report it looks like you're evaluating different options for the camera. I think that's a good idea given that the game feels slow with the current setup. There's only so much you can do with camera settings such as field of view. I hope you experiment with several options including a fixed overhead camera. Maybe these won't work, but I think that it's worth trying.