The last time this came up, it was an unhandled exception that basically killed the combat thread. Probably something similar this time. In any case, thanks! Hoping to get it back into a playable state shortly, haha.
Welp, that's definitely a bug! Flee is supposed to move you to an adjacent room on completion, which is, of course, exactly what it did until some time today. Working on a fix now!
Not OP but somebody else who has worked on the platform. Thanks for the feedback! I can't give quite as good of a response as teebes but I'll take a crack at it.
- Patreon isn't the ideal subscription service but it was the most lightweight tool we could find for the job since some users wanted to contribute and it didn't make sense to integrate a full payment platform right now. Is there a particular reason that you find it off-putting?
- Telnet actually came up recently on the Discord. It's something we might do, but would take a fair bit of work and loses out on some of the UI we've incorporated to try to make combat a little more engaging like cool down timers and cast bars. That said, we're not opposed to it if there's enough demand and people would actually use it.
- We've actually had a few visually impaired players and gotten some very useful feedback! There is a 'Use Accessibility Layout' option that tries to optimize the experience for screenreaders, although there is likely room for iteration.
- That's a fair point and may be tough to optimize to the same degree while taking advantage of the more modern frameworks that make the platform (hopefully) more user-friendly. That said, there's probably some refinement that could be done there to at least help a little and I would imagine that once in-game, the packets going back and forth don't put too much strain on the connection.
Always good to hear from people who know the space!
It's frustrating how hard of a sell the text medium can be, especially with how creative authors have grown to explore what visual media isn't well-suited for. So many of my avid gamer friends just won't give anything with such a minimal UI an honest shot, even if they loved playing similar games in the past when it was more of a necessity.
Incidentally, I was actually thinking of submitting something that I'd been working on for the competition, but I didn't think it would qualify since it was already publicly distributed. It's up at https://writtenrealms.com/worlds/7996/brimstone-prologue, so if anybody is into this kind of thing and has some time to kill, I'd actually love to hear any feedback!