I'm worried that people won't see past the 'side-scrolling' label in the same way they didn't see past Tidalis' 'puzzle' label. The indie games industry is knee-deep in shallow side-scrollers for little money, and it may be tough to get people to take the time to learn that this isn't just the same thing but more expensive.
That's certainly a possibility, but I think it's less damaging than "your art makes my eyes bleed, so I won't play it," which was what a lot of people who weren't already Arcen fans were saying. When it comes to the marketing material and general descriptions of the game, we tend to focus on the macrogame bits, too. With Tidalis, we had the disadvantage of it actually being a puzzle game, just with new mechanics that weren't a Bejeweled ripoff. But being a side scroller means a lot of different things, and I think it can be clear that there is more going on here once we are able to show things like crafting settlement buildup, etc, in the videos.
How are you going to handle enemy difficulty now? I was looking forward to getting out of my depth in high level areas and having to sneak around the tough enemies, or use traps and planning to take them on one at a time. Will these things still be possible? It seems like it would be hard to put a really nasty enemy in without it being a roadblock, the side-scrolling element making it harder to go around.
As Keith noted, the new design actually makes some of this easier. Before there were way too many ways to go around enemies, but your field of vision was limited enough that by the time you saw an enemy, the enemy saw you. Here we have a lot more flexibility, because movement past enemies is inherently more bottlenecked, which actually makes things easier for us. Since we know you're going to have to get physically past X tough enemy if the enemy is there, that means we can focus on things like, for instance, abilities that let you leap or fly over the enemy in question; abilities that make you invisible or harder to detect and thus slip past the enemy; abilities that let you separate the enemy from the other enemies around, to pick it off one by one (the Seize spell that we'll be talking about today already does this, and you can actually see it in practice at one point in the video (0:29).
There's also the fact that quite often there are multiple routes, and so simply finding a way to go around (vertically or otherwise) is something that is very possible to do. This video showed a lot of walking along the surface because that's what looks visually best at the moment, but that's not the extent of the gameplay at all.
