Well, after reading most of the posts in this thread, I have to say my dreams of what indie games can accomplish, and why they're so important in the world, have died a little. AVWW1 had big dreams, it didn't sell well. The devs answer was to get less "indie", and go for more of a low budget mainstream approach.... :sigh:
The problem with low sales of AVWW1 wasn't necessarily because you were thinking outside the box or bad marketing, Steam got your message out adequately for AVWW1, that's how I found it and bought it. I played it and was verily impressed with the gauche audacity of an indie developer to go for this scope of a game.
Crazy intricate mouse/keyboard UI that had me binding all 10 of my extra buttons on my G700 Logitech laser gaming mouse, crazy "graph mapping" that made me read up on wtf that even is (and loved it). Insanely ambitious procedural gen levels that never end, the continent just keeps evolving into harder forms as you get better, harder mobs as you kill more.
But there were things still not so hot about it. The procedural gen levels needed work, the mob AI needed work, the repeatable quests needed tweaking, the overhead strategy game needed more to it.
Strategy game improvements on the side table for now, it didn't need to have AVWW1's big dreams abandoned to make some ode to retro 8-bit platforming game with focused linear platforming level design... It didn't sell well for one simple reason, the seed group such as myself, played the crap out of AVWW 1 and realized it had an awesome design premise but still needed work to be the game we could go to all of our gaming friends with and brag up as awesome then they go buy it and brag it up to their friends etc, and away your Minecraft feedback loop goes with sales aplenty.
That work wasn't abandoning your big dreams to go more low budget mainstream, the seed group *was in it* for the big dreams, and the big dream had *nothing what so ever* to do with getting our hands on an ode to retro 8-bit platforming experience. What we (the main contingent of seed group AVWW 1 fans) wanted was keep your gouche big indie dreams alive and improve the implementation of them so we could go brag the game up to our other gaming friends and get them playing it.
Just my two cents, since you added back in mouse aiming, I'm going to wade back in again, give it another serious go.