Wow thank you so much! If you ever want to know how to achieve certain effects, let me know. I'll be uploading an update later on today which will fix a bunch of bugs that have come to my attention and enable some currently disabled features. I'll also copy the credits over to the title screen so you can look at what plugins and resources I've used without beating the game.
Okay!
I skip the rpg maker title screen altogether. The game starts on a blank map and I use picture files to draw my own title screen. The background (what you can see through the window), office wall and text are all separate pictures. This lets me manipulate them using the move picture command (turning the background white during lightning flashes for example.)
Then I just use a show choices command over the top of all that and voila! Title screen.
Oh god the inventory screen. Yeah so I did my own plugin for all of that and I just worked it out as I went along, I think I made a real mess of it but I got it working how I wanted to in the end!
To remove weapons and armor from the inventory you can use this code as a plugin:
Window_ItemCategory.prototype.makeCommandList = function() {
this.addCommand(TextManager.item, 'item');
//this.addCommand(TextManager.weapon, 'weapon');
//this.addCommand(TextManager.armor, 'armor');
this.addCommand(TextManager.keyItem, 'keyItem');
};
You can see all I've done here is comment out the weapon and armor with '//'. The key item category I renamed to 'notes' in the Database -> Terms section. There may be a better way to do this, but it worked for me!