Its been an interesting 3 days of alpha testing the game. What I've discovered is that the amount of time people spend in the game literally exploded from 15 seconds a visit to 10-15 minutes a visit when I made slight tweaks to the graphics engine (to be less ascii-like). Also it appears that most casual drop-ins were most disturbed by:

• the very low density of simultaneous users (eg. it was usually one visitor at a time, plus me)
• wasd controls which did not work like typical wasd movement controls -- you keep moving until you press the same direction twice, which users found confusing
• in one instance the top down, fixed center world rendering made him feel ill

Its been very instructive, especially since I am trying to figure out what to do at this point. I believe that my best bet is to improve the controls, adding perhaps mouse control over movement, and attacks (though no one asked for this specifically); and also to make wasd movement more natural.

One of the interesting technological things I implemented was the notion of dynamically generated tiles: they are rendered via polygons and ascii characters, on to a single in-memory tile, which I then cache for the remainder of the rendering cycle. Previously, I was computing the polygons every since rendering -- which tended to bog down the client of course. I'm trying to avoid the use of real pre-rendered tiles, because its kind of time intensive and expensive.

Onwards...