Thank you for the feedback. I know it feels strange for WASD to have only diagonal character movement. We wanted to have 8-way movement, but our animator couldn't animate movement in every single direction in three weeks. 8-way movement will be one of our top priorities for the full release. By contrast between the buttons and the gameplay, do you mean the buttons should be a different color, or something else?
Viewing post in Marina's Sea Garden jam comments
I completely understand how hard it is to make isometric movement feel less awkward! To answer your question on contrast, you could utilize complementary colors or play with saturation to have the text stand out and be more readable to the player while in gameplay. For the menu/movement instructions, you could up the contrast here have a dark multiply/overlay layer over gameplay, thus ensuring that the buttons can pop in comparison to the rest of the screen. Hopefully this clarifies a bit on my thoughts!