Ahhh yes Chris I completely agree with you and I fear that I might have been misunderstood
I love the graphics of the game, especially at night because the lightning system of light emmitting sources looks outstanding! Like I mentioned, the game itself was exactly what I was looking for, so this style of game graphics 2D/3D is great and I've no wishes to change it.
In my post I was reffering to the GUI, mainly to everything around the game panel or game screen if you wish. I've mocked up something in my spare time, and since I'm doing college next to work and I don't really have much of it , and came up with something like this
You may click on the image to open the large version
Mainly the features I'd like to point out.
First of all, there is no need for a round map since there is no camera rotation. A square map would be easier to understand in terms of direction aswell as getting your general bearings more easily, I am reffering to newer players.
As the map gets smaller there is more room for other stuff. My suggestion is Tree System based Menus. Five major categories which all have alternating five lower bottom categories. Yes, they would change with each top category.
The first one - Character would have.
Overview - Character Equipment View, Health, Mana, Spirit, Hunger, Weight, Experience Bars and Active Effects from equipment - The pannel you see and the general pannel people would be playing with.
Equipment - Character Equipment View and all armor and weapon bonuses - Protection Vs Axes and simillar.
Skills - The entire window of skills transported into the side pannel.
Titles - In form of a list.
Magic - The magic book.
The second one - Inventory would have.
Overview - The same Backpack Icon, Character Equipment View possibly plus the inventory transfered bellow it with side buttons for categories.
Value - A tab that would show you, without opening your treasure tab how much Gold Coins you are carrying and would also display the entire worth of your inventory summing up your Gold Coins and the worth of each item. Note, damaged items would count as being damaged, so 1/150 platinum armor would only count for 1 Gold Coin.
So far that is it, but three more could be added later.
The third category - Social would have.
Quests - The quest list, same Quest Icon, transferred to the side pannel.
Friends list - A place where you can add friends and click them to chat with them via private chat, you would be able to see who is Online and who is Offline.
Ignore list - Sooner or later every game needs one.
Party - The Party System with each player in the party in its own row with Health, Mana, Spirit and Hunger shown next to the name. Party options, disbanding, changing leader, loot options and simmilar would be found here.
Clans - Clans bring a lot of social interactions in games and would have a list simmilar to Friends List with Clan Rankings and Titles.
The fourth category - Global would have.
Full Map - Opens the full map like it does now, also achievable by clicking on the minimap.
Spirit Travel - Saved locations list and option to travel there.
Property - All property options already exsisting and to be added such as who is invited, freeze and unfreeze items, host a party and more.
Highscores - Possibility of viewing highscores in game, displays a list over the entire pannel.
The last category - Options would have.
Game - This would also include translucency options.
Graphics - Everything graphical related.
Sound - Everything sound related.
Hotkeys - Assign and unassign hotkeys.
Quit - The quit button is located in the options menu and the game can be quit only from here.
The major point in changing the menus is that since the game window is small and there for poses a limited visibility, there should be as much as possible happening around the screen as not to obstruct the view. Actions such as opening the skills menu completely obstruct it and can be life threatening in some cases. The menu change would hopefully remove these issues. (Also I know that you can move windows out of the way in full screen but I like windowed mode because you are allowed to do other things, for me that is logging Drops and writing down Item Information )
The game window would not have a windows window around it, I do believe there is a command for it in every scripting language, so it would look as in the image. This brings a possibility of looking a little bit more professional aswell as allowing cleaner GUI design, the downside is that there will be no minimize window. But a Show Desktop would still minimize it, aswell as a right click and Minimize of course.
The chat idea is as it it seen, with colors for each Category as well as an All Category Button to show activity in all Categories respectively.
Clicking a Menu Category would color its backround White like seen in the image, all others would be Gray. Just to know where in the Menu you currently are.
That's it, I hope it didn't take too much of your time to read this through.
I really hope that you will be able to find some interesting information from all this, I really appreciate your effort,
Time