Yeah, it's not really finished, I rushed it yesterday to get it to a usable state - The collision detection is all happening on the server rather than the in the browser which is why the movement is sluggish (it needs to send the move command to the server then back again before the player starts moving, so there's a delay there); I need to have the collision map on the browser too which will eliminate that.
I also need to get the NPC decisions working in a cycle and send their update to the browser all at once, rather than having loads of timeouts and updating the browser individually, so it doesn't send hundreds of messages a seconds - then I can have more NPCs to make it a bit more challenging and add some nooks in the shelves to improve the strategy element...
The tile based step by step movement was to reduce the number movement messages sent to the server, but i can experiment with that and see how intensive it would be with free movement - it could be fine, but it's running on very cheap vps.
I agree the shop background and character animation needs improving - and the item placement could be improved. I have a plan to add sound to it too. I want to make it better and I learnt a lot by doing it (mostly how to code NPCs in a multiplayer game). What do you think could make this game more fun?