Hello mickio1,
Thank you for a honest review.
You're right - many aspects of this game sucks - especially graphics.
I'm a programmer, but I like drawing graphics and I'm willing to get better :)
I did not care much about graphics - as they say it's not that important in roguelikes.
From the time perspective I think it might have been a reason for this game's failure, as many people reject the game purely based on the look of it.
I stopped development of it due to a lack of interest from players. No one to blame. There are many very good games on the market - so it's hard to get an attention.
Before releasing it I wanted to get any response as I was not sure if game is mature enough.
Here are (some of) attempts:
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=62792.0
https://forums.roguetemple.com/index.php?topic=5480.0
Again no-one to blame, forums are full of trash mixed with a small percentage of good games. I'm myself not commenting work of others - my (poor) excuse: lack of time.
During a year after release there were about 9 big updates of it - making it a decent coffee-break game - kind of what I envisioned. Still I got maybe 8 reviews on steam and zero on itch (I guess itch has way smaller audience).
So the key is to make a good game and then somehow get attention of community - I failed at least at a second part.
Armed with a knowledge I got when creating it I'm thinking about creation of the sequel - that would be a big game with an outer world and many dungeons you can enter from it.
I'm designing games in my spare time - so it's a slow process, and getting slower as I'm getting older :).
At the moment I'm not sure if alpha version will ever appear. Since year I'm designing some stuff for it, but it's way too slow pace of development. Anyway you can get a preview of assets on my twitter account:
https://twitter.com/KotoGames
Have fun playing the game,
Regards,
Tom