Thanks for taking the time to note down your thoughts! A few responses:
1. Warp potions also work on the region map. Hit period instead of comma when you are in a building, then click the surface (or anywhere else) and then go directly where you want. No, you can't go directly out to the world map using this method, but it's a pretty minor thing to get there. And anywhere within a region you can easily get back to anywhere else in that region that you've previously created.
2. We definitely want to do multi-color tooltips, but the way that would work here is a bit more complex than what is happening in AI War, and we have some code extension that we have to make before that can really happen. But I very much want it, too.
3. It's an interesting point about the skelebots, I'll keep that in mind. I need to do some more enemies before the skelebots can really be moved to their final destination anyhow, which is the junkyards.
4. The icicle leapers are the easiest of the easy enemies in a lot of respects. Think of them like the wall-crawlers in Metroid, or Goombas in Mario. Every enemy isn't designed to give a challenge, some just the opposite.
But I do plan on having "elite" versions of a lot of the enemy types later, with added things like chasing for the leapers for instance.
5. What difficulty level are you playing on? The default is meant to be fairly tame so that people aren't getting their butts handed to them constantly. I tend to play on Master Hero and play about 4 region levels up, which is what is generally expected for a really solid player; if you're playing at like-level regions, that again is saying that you want things to be kind of moderately easy, just kind of the average experience. If you've got hardcore gamer Metroidvania skills, you'll need to play up in region levels and/or increase the action difficulty level. The defaults for the game aren't meant to be prohibitively difficult, which is more or less what it sounds like you're experiencing.
6. Lots more planned like ride the lightning, don't worry.
7. The 1-10 hot key setup is yours to change as you will, but that's the default we're going for because -- as you said -- it's easier for new players to understand. I'm not particularly open to changing that default because I feel it would harm new player adoption, but that's precisely why we give such crazy flexible keymapping options. Same deal with space for jump. That is THE jump key as far as most PC gamers are concerned, and there's no way I'd change that here, but you're free to do absolutely whatever you like best. If folks even want to share their inputbindindings.dat files with alternate key bindings setups, that's something that might be interesting for players to share with likeminded players.
8. For the option that moves your mouse needing to turn off when the escape menu is up, that sounds like a good one for mantis.
9. In terms of lack of direction, if you're talking about just at the start, then sure that was the way. You might give the intro mission a go and see what you think after that. However, in general this is kind of self-directed at the moment as with AI War. We have some plans on things that would be shorter-term goals to pursue, but in terms of the larger goals there are overlords out there and you need to find them, kill them, and otherwise level up. And if you want to get better stuff, that's certainly giving you some short-term goals in terms of places to go to get new things.
10. There's no way to "clear" a region on the world map, just FYI. A lot of the regions themselves are infinite in size when you consider their caves. You can fully explore the surface and buildings and such, but we really don't even encourage that (kind of like taking every planet in AI War -- possible, but not really the most fun way to play). Better to cherry pick what you actually want, in terms of best ways to level up, get better equipment, and so on and so forth.
Cheers!
