Obviously my top regret is not to have finished and shipped it back in its day.
Beyond that, there are a few other things that I would do differently today:
- Soften the difficulty. The game is very challenging even on the Novice level. I’ve won a couple of times on the Intermediate level, and never on the Expert level. Even on Novice, things can go well for a time and turn bad very very quickly. Healing should be faster, and wandering monsters should be rarer.
- Some of the special effects happen too quickly to appreciate them. An animated highlight to draw attention ahead of the effect, slowed pacing, or explanation would help the user appreciate and process some of the special attacks, especially the bite and poison attacks, and the teleport trap. The Mirror Man only shatters on a critical hit, but I should have made him shatter upon any death. That sort of thing.
- Healing adds one hit point and one magic point. You can therefore use your Heal spell to rebalance and heal fully faster. That’s a useful thing but an annoying mechanic.
- The shutter-transition when changing to the Spells screen or a Treasure screen gets annoying. The audio for that transition doubly-so.
- The manual step of looking for treasure should be unnecessary – defeating a monster should have automatically revealed the treasure.