Random thoughts-- I"m going to be honest but not necessarily polite
The first thing I saw when opening this was a reference to "wild lawyercats". This made me smile.
The login seemed unnecessary and antiquated. If I had run across this applet at random, instead of finding this thread and having the creator specifically ask for help, I probably would have walked away right there. I don't like signing up for accounts and I don't think most other people do, either. I think it is important to create a flow, when "login" is necessary, to kind of "trick" people into signing in, or at least make it as quick and seamless as possible. A few games I've seen like this dump you right in with a name like "guest98495", then give you the opportunity to create a nick afterward. Services like this I've set up, i've tried unifying the login/password box so that if you just enter an l/p that doesn't exist, it registers you instantly. If I were doing this I'd probably aim for a login flow like: bring the game world up immediately, so that the user can see something there enticing them to log in; ask them to enter a username; if the username is already registered, ask for a password; if the username is registered, start the game but toss up a box offering to let them register a persistent account with a password/email. This way people won't have the chance to go "I have to register? No thanks!", by the time they realize they have to enter a password they have already kind of emotionally committed a little by hitting return.
My first 15 seconds were pretty harsh. The game kept freezing up for seconds at a time and jerking (I am playing in Chrome on a Mac). I would go seconds at a time without response. For a pixel art game that is kind of crippling, I feel like NES-type games are all about fluid responsive play control.
The controls seem arbitrary. "e" and "i" aren't near each other. The sword doesn't seem to be picked by default, but at some point I picked by accident; arrow keys and spacebar are a sensible set of controls but by the first sign telling me "use 'e'" i wasn't thinking about the space bar...
I feel like the game could have made the controls more "obvious" or revealed them to you through gameplay instead of having you read all these signs. A game this simple doesn't really seem like it needs a multi-minute tutorial. On top of this, the signs (and there were a LOT of them) were unpleasant to interact with. I also ran into this problem where half the time when I walked up to a sign it wouldn't respond; meanwhile, it quickly started to seem weird I was spending all this time on signs but when I look at a sign I have to take my eye off my character and look at little text in the corner of the screen. This all made me impatient about treating the signs as a method of exploring. I wanted to just barge through doors and wander around, I didn't try looking at signs or trying to understand why some doors opened and some didn't. What if the signs triggered just by you walking near them instead of having to hit "e", what if they splatted text on screen as an overlay rather than going into the text box in the corner?
Once I got out of the tutorial area, I encountered more control problems. As I walked around, sometimes the game would stutter for a few seconds; sometimes the game would run at double-speed for a few seconds, and there was no apparent reason why. It was disorienting (again, especially for such a simple game). The erratic speeds and the nonresponsive world elements (like the signs) made me feel like I didn't have much control over the game world, when things like doors didn't respond I didn't feel sure whether it was an actual gameplay thing I just didn't understand (I did see the "red doorknobs" sign) or a bug. Similarly at one point I accidentally realized there was a building near the start space that I could climb on top of; I spent about 30 seconds crawling over the building trying to figure out if that was something that was supposed to be happening or a collision bug. Using the sword was similarly weird, if I walked as quickly as I could and tapped the sword button I would see the sword appearing, briefly... behind me, stabbing into my back. What?
The art style was a good start but I didn't feel like it was very attention-grabbing and it didn't seem to give things a lot of "definition", I didn't always feel immediately sure I knew what I was looking at. This was especially true of the "3D" elements (I.E. I had trouble telling the difference between things I could step "onto" and things that were just walls, like the mystery building). I liked the main character sprite more than anything else on the screen.
Once I got out of the "city" I killed my first lawyercat. It didn't seem to offer any challenge (except the challenge of getting the sword to hit where I meant, since I couldn't move and sword at the same time) and its death seemed confusing, it abruptly disappeared and a pile of gold appeared nearby but not where the lawyercat had been standing. At about this point I'm like, okay, I want to explore, and just jammed the "up" and "left " keys to see what happened if I just kept walking. As far as I could tell, the entire game world from there was a homogenous open plain with vaguely repeating grass patterns and groups of milling lawyercats. If I kept walking up and to the left, the lawyercats were no risk, since they ran slower than me and couldn't catch up to attack; I could have done that forever. There didn't seem to be much of an impetus to do anything in particular, there was no reason to explore because all areas were essentially the same and there was no clearly defined reward for killing lawyercats. Eventually, I came to a large square area that was just black-- totally black-- and when I walked inside the area, I was obscured by the black. Because this was the one unique thing I'd seen so far (and seemed like a bug) I kind of played in and around this; it looked like a map tile that didn't load or something. I tried to take a screenshot, and as I did so this happened:
- The game froze for a second or two (like it does periodically)
- One frame was visible of a lawyercat standing near me
- The game froze for another second or two like that
- The game unfroze and I was dead
Though, it's possible this wasn't the game's fault and the mac screenshot function had frozen up the browser or something.
In short: I stopped playing it "after a minute" because the gameplay was nonresponsive and nothing seemed to be happening. You've got what seems like a good technical start and there are a lot of interesting directions you can take this, but there's not really anything like an engaging game there right now.
I'd suggest trying out Realm of the Mad God if you haven't already, it is a game somewhat similar to this one. For one thing they get a lot of things right, for another as your most immediate competition you should probably try to identify one thing your game can/will do better than ROTMG does so you've got a specific argument for playing this instead of ROTMG.
EDIT: Some screenshots
Weird building I could climb on for no obvious reason
http://i.imgur.com/sAuby.pngInky blackness of eternal night
http://i.imgur.com/JguWk.png