Well, a few intrepid souls have logged on and tried RealmLike out during the day. These folks will have made things a little easier for everyone who tries it out tonight, as through their feedback and my own observations I have identified a few troublesome areas that didn’t give me any problems but which weren’t exactly intuitive to outside eyes.

Stairs were previously labeled “v stairs v” and “^ stairs ^”, to indicate directions. Since the first stairs you encounter are pointing downward, this means the first thing you see is stairs surrounded by a letter v. Two of the three people I witnessed playing the game did the logical thing and pressed V to use the stairs. This is doubly confusing, as the Climb command (Z) is the only one whose key shortcut is not directly derived from its name. I’ve now relabeled the stairs as “Stairs [Up/Down] Press Z”.

The trainer in town is currently separate from the training menu you can bring up by pressing +. This is because the trainer can teach you new classes, but as this was the only intended function of the trainer when I implemented it, talking to one while you’re not ready to gain a level gave a message saying to come back when you were ready to train, even if you had other training to do. I’ve now adjusted the trainer to bring up the normal training interface when you’re not leveling. Long-term, I’ll merge the two interfaces and just give you the extra options when you access it through a trainer.

These two things created a potentially frustrating ping-pong experience for players, as you could spend precious new game energy time trying to figure out the arcane secrets of the stairs only to be told to finish your training, and then go talk to the trainer and be told you’re not ready to train. I’ve now ironed out those wrinkles.

I also made secret passages show up more distinctly; the subtle color shift when your perception is high enough to notice them wasn’t really very noticeable, and since there’s an internal “perception check” being made, a real-life one isn’t called for.

A couple of more vicious monsters had their levels labeled incorrectly so were spawning too frequently on the first level. This has been fixed.

Finally, I made a sort of “initiative roll”/delay when a monster moves adjacent to you so that it doesn’t immediately attack the same tick if its attack is cooled down. There’s no visible wind-up, but if you have auto defend on (it is on by default), your character may score the first strike, depending on their attack speed and reflexes.