Most things in the game map that do flash, are very important for the player to take note of. Such as:
1) Enemies flash, so you don't forget about them when you go to move, so you don't die unnecessarily, which always feels unfair.
2) Runic Objects (Enchanter, Pool, Forge) flash so that if you are looking for one to do upgrading, elixir refilling, or crafting, then you don't miss them. Also, they flash on the map out of FOV, so you know where to go after you've passed one.
3) Portals flash, to make you aware of them, so that you don't stay too close to them. That's where the enemies come from.
4) Stairs flash, to help the player find the way out of the sea of ASCII characters.
5) The Runestone flashes, as it is a combination of the Enchanter, Pool and Forge, rolled into one and attuning to it acts as your respawn point.
6) Biome-Specific Lootables and Chaos Strongboxes have the potential of having really great loot inside, and thus the player will want to notice them.
7) Treasure Fiends drop a lot of loot, if you can kill them, making them something the player will want to focus on.
The most important objects flashes prismatically; all 7 colors of the rainbow. So these are biome-specific lootables, Chaos Strongboxes, Treasure Fiends, Primal Chaos Portals, Descending Runic Gates, and the Runestone. Otherwise flashing is there to help a player notice them on varying biomes with different floor colors; ie an Archer is normally Yellow, so that is going to be hard to see on a Light Yellow floor color of the Desolate Ruins biome... so by making it flash, you actually notice them.
Well, that is why I suggest doing the interactive tutorial. It has almost fully phased out the old textual tutorial (which is found in the escape menu if someone ever wants to read it) and helps to teach most players the basics of gameplay so that they can play the game successfully. After implementing the interactive tutorial, the number of complaints from brand new players about not knowing what is going on, has greatly been reduced. So, I suggest you do the interactive tutorial; if it is not active, go to Options at the Main Menu, and activate it (I made it an option to disable it for returning players that didn't want to redo the tutorial). Mouse information appears on a line above your health bar, by the way.
Well, if you ever went to save the game manually, you'd have to press escape (ESC) to do it. If you simply closed the application, forcefully, then it wouldn't save. Unless you had been playing for at least 5 minutes, in which it would have autosaved, or if you had switched floors, then it would also autosave.
Sometimes a simple character can convey a lot of information, but it generally requires the user to play that game a fair bit to be able to recognize quickly what the symbol means. I've tried to work on this system further by color-coded various objects as well, so even if you don't recognize the character, the color of the character is consistent. As an example, all melee horde are blue, all ranged horde are yellow, and all spellcaster horde are red. All melee primals are green, all ranged primals are orange, and all spellcaster primals are purple. Specific walls are always the same color so a person should be able to recognize an illusionary wall from a solid wall.
I understand that narration in games and graphical tiles can greatly improve the UI and the ability for a user to recognize key objects, but right now I'm working with what I have, and trying to do the best I can do with my limited set of tools and abilities.
EDIT: Forgot to upload the second Hotfix here. Updated main post!
