Anon,

Thanks for the feedback!  Some of this grindiness will go away as more features get implemented.

• Right now there isn't a vendor to sell items and buy potions.  I want potions to be rare drops but worth spending gold on.  Vendors won't be in the engine for a few more updates though.
• Once Powers are implemented, many characters (anyone who invests in Magic or Defense) will be able to heal themselves.
• I've doubled the starting passive health regen rate.  This is in subversion but not released yet.
• There will also be lower level food that work as weak potions.  These will be added soon.
• Eventually there will be dozens of dungeons, with different tilesets and enemy compositions entirely.
• In the end, yes it will take a lot of killing to level up.  To level from 8 to 9 will take 8+ hours!  The goal is to create a huge game world and some story/quests so that finally making it to level 9 feels fantastic.
• The level cap is 9, but you can max out a weapon skill at level 5 if you want.  The skill points spent at level 8 and 9 will usually be to balance out secondary skills (e.g. beefing up Defense).  This means you don't need to be far along in the game before you start feeling like a particular character class.  At the final levels you're mostly tougher because you've found great equipment.

Of course, if something happens and I can't create an enormous game world eventually, I'll just flatten the leveling curve or make random dungeons.

***

Compatability mode on vista sounds like something worth trying.  Anyone running Vista, please try that and get back to me.  Apologies again for the Vista BSODs!

Pompei2, no I wasn't aware of it.  It's something I might look into once I put out a long-term release.

I found the osx error (a missing image).  Trying to upload osx v0.09b.

I think the Vista issue is different, but I'll go back and test the download on my WinXP to make sure it's not a missing file issue.

Anonymous:

- Yes I plan to add click-to-move as a gameplay option.

- I can experiment with changing where loot drops, but I think accidentally picking up loot is unavoidable.  Maybe there's some other method I'm not thinking of?

- I use Blender to create all my tilesets and creature art.  There is a camera setting (Orthographic, angle 60,0,45) that will render tiles at perfect video game isometric view.  Then I tweak the camera height and scale until the tile fits the size I want (e.g. 64x32 base tiles).  I don't have videos or tutorials yet but one day I will make some.