Thank you! The presentation is influenced by a few things:
- A thing I'm fascinated by is whether changes in the camera's perspective affect the level of player identification with the player character. This game uses perspective and shadows to emphasize the reality of the player and the diminished importance of the world -- things disappear when they would be out of your view and all the shapes subtly shift to emphasize the camera position. However, unlike a full first-person game, all objects remain in your awareness and nearby objects have equal importance to distant ones. And -- while I do deliberately replace the player's cursor, unlike in a first-person _shooter_, I never steal the cursor or impose resistance on it.
- Compare Civ 2's earlygame as an example of a game with a similar gameplay loop that uses shadows but not perspective, and Minecraft as an example of a game with a similar gameplay loop that goes way harder into forcing player identification via view angle and theft of the cursor.
- A second thing I'm fascinated by is design systems that put purely abstract things on the same conceptual level as non-abstract things. For me this comes from having a lifetime fascination with slot machines, but you see the same concept in games that resemble spreadsheets and dayplanners. In a retro game, everything is represented by iconography that in some way simplifies the thing it is, meaning that creatures can easily have equal status to creature icons and to blocks of text.
- A third thing is that I'm not very good at pixel art! Or representational art in general, really.