Thanks for the feedback! i'm glad to hear that my conversion to 3D was not a slap in the face to every roguelike fan! :-)
I know that the fancy stuff isn't what it's all about, and I'm eager to dig back into creating a satisfying game loop. I must admit that 3D does slow down development quite a bit... slapping together some pixel art is one thing, but finding competent models and materials is really tough since I'm not an artist.
That said, a ton of my time has been spent on getting the feel of driving, and I do believe that 3D is paying off in that respect. My biggest challenges is to remind the player when they are at speed and what exactly is going down when they start to skid. That will probably be tweaked for quite a while in the future.
It sounds like you are playing with the cursor keys, which I added for laptop support. Glad to hear it works. One of the weirdnesses of orienting a grid diagonally is that you can't use 4-directional movement and hit every square... I have some strategies for that in the long run. For now, if you hold shift it will rotate the arrow movement when you press the cursor keys (I didn't have time in this release to show shift-diagonal feedback onscreen). Also, the keypad and the 9-key cluster around JKL/UIO/M,. will work on all 8 directions. Thank god for Rewired, it's pretty easy to add new setups.
It is my lament that I didn't set up enough of a content loop to allow you to acquire/sell/upgrade items for this update! My focus was really to show a proof of concept to a bunch of people and provide hooks into the rest of the system. The more I play myself, the more I want to shift focus onto the content loop... luckily I set up a lot of equipment, enemy and quest infrastructure that I think I can make some good progress in coming months.
Again, thanks for giving it a spin! It's been a bit nerve-wracking getting something I'm comfortable with out in the wild. As you can see, I can only see "To do" stickys all over the place. :-)