Goes from moderate to "whoa, this is gonna take a little while" too fast. Level 1 looks like a nice casual game, Level 2 looks like I need to get a cup of coffee before I start it.<p>It might increase stickiness to make the perceived difficulty increase more slowly. Or to even have a trivial Level 1 just to get people used to the controls (they're not hard, but don't assume anything).
You should pretty it up and talk to SPIL Games - <a href="http://www.html5contest.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.html5contest.com</a> - they're paying $$$ for HTML5 games.<p>Also if you're interested I'm wrapping up a JavaScript version of my API from <a href="http://playtomic.com" rel="nofollow">http://playtomic.com</a>, in addition to the analytics it has stuff like a level sharing API that would let you have user-created levels, leaderboards etc. If you want you can test the JS version for me. Email's in my profile if you're interested.
1. Brighter Colors!<p>2. The first level is too hard to hook casual players. You want their first experience to be brain-dead obvious -- hopefully to the point of eliminating the need for instructions.<p>Maybe (@=you, 0=rock, X=goal, viva nethack):<p><pre><code> ......
.@.0..
....X.
......</code></pre>
It's very difficult for me to distinguish between the gray color of the regular floor and the light-green color of the goals. I'm somewhat color blind, maybe that's why.
I am using a netbook, so the screen is small and when I won I did not saw the "You Win" sing. I think that the screen should change more (perhaps the color of the background, the face of the character, or some fireworks :) ).