- 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
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...