Actually, believe it or not, they're
not in La Mulana's style.
Useless trivia time!
La Mulana's graphics really are something to behold, and
not because they're flashy. Actually, it's because the creators of the game painstakingly imitated the graphical limitations of one of the MSX's video modes. The defining characteristic of this 'style' of graphics is that the original MSX could not support more than two colors in a single eight-by-one horizontal line of pixels. Transparent sprites could violate this rule, sort of; sprites were a single color, and were drawn over everything else. Some games demonstrated more colorful sprites, probably by overlapping one or more sprites to represent a single object on-screen. It wasn't a Famicom, but it could still produce some nice looking visuals for the time.
On the other hand, the ZX Spectrum was decidedly not graphically powerful. It was an inexpensive and capable
home computer, not a dedicated gaming machine - but that didn't stop anyone. Gamers and game makers embraced the Spectrum warts and all, even though it could only draw two colors for every
eight-by-eight pixel block, the size of a single typographical character on the screen. Transparent sprites and other such luxuries were not supported, resulting in fairly severe 'attribute clash', which had to be dealt with in a number of creative ways.
Not only that, the MSX and the ZX Spectrum had entirely different default palettes! While both featured the same number of colors, the colors themselves were different for each. The ZX Spectrum featured something not unlike the default palette in MS Paint, while the MSX was somewhat more varied and a bit more muted. See below:
ZX Spectrum
MSXSo, if you feel like splitting hairs...
The tiles I posted could have been displayed by an MSX - with different colors. However, they're meant to imitate the blockiness and vivid coloration of the ZX Spectrum.
Here are the same food tiles, faithfully rendered in MSX style:
So now that you've had your fill of utterly useless 80's computer trivia...
I'm a big fan of
Castle of the Winds myself. It was my first rogue-like, before I even knew what rogue-likes were! The drag and drop 'paper doll' inventory system was easy to understand, even though the variety of items was somewhat... bland. I didn't care, I was like, twelve at the time. But let's take a look at the inventory system here: Three equipment slots total. One for each hand, one for the body. The only thing that making these slots 'real' would accomplish is that when you equip an item, it leaves your normal inventory. If you could carry anything in your hands, this would give the player a bonus of two extra inventory slots from the start, but unless the inventory works that way then I can't help but feel that these changes would just be mostly cosmetic.
I'm really against giving items specific weights and volumes unless the system is very, very simple to work with. Diablo-style backpacks and others like them (Resident Evil 4, I'm looking at you) are just a pain in the ass. (If I wanted to turn inventory management into a block puzzle, I'd play Tetris or Tangrams or something!) If at some point in the future
roguedjack wanted to make the inventory account for small items versus large items intuitively, assigning a simple number from 1-5 representing item size, and then assigning a capacity number to the inventory (say 8 or 10 to start) would be the best way to go. No difficult decimal math on the user's end to tell if something will fit, just simple mental addition and subtraction. Equipped items could be removed from your inventory and carried or worn regardless of size.
With the added inventory space, time management in firefights or zombie raids would become a bit more paramount. Dropping a held item could be considered a free action (I think dropping is already, but you have to remove an equipped first before dropping it) while inserting or removing inventory items should not be; swapping a held item for one in your inventory would take twice as long as dropping the one you have in your hand and picking up another one. Reloading could take as long as swapping, but if ammo is smaller (which it tends to be) then it would make more sense to carry lots of ammo instead of a handful of loaded weapons. (But it wouldn't restrict the player's style; maybe you
want to do things musketeer style and have a few loaded firearms ready.) It's a small difference, but with the veritable zombie armies that you run into after week two, escape simply isn't an option most of the time. Small details like this should in practice affect how players prepare for and approach their friendly neighborhood undead-mutant menace without slugging things down at all.
