(EDIT: I have closed this topic as this project ended up going nowhere. It's very likely I'll pick up the general "make a good RPG" goal again at some point, though. But I think a big part of this is I need to re-think how I approach the project overall.)
So, you all have seen (and if you're interested, most likely played) my RPG Maker VX Ace project,
Legends of an Otherworld. As a quick recap, I started developing that game in 2011, completed about 60% of it, then it sat abandoned for years until I resumed work on it in 2017, ultimately releasing the first "complete" version near the end of 2017, with the last bugfix update bang-on new years' day 2018.
During the time the original project sat abandoned, as well as after its completion, I've spoken of making a remake of it in either a custom engine or the newer (and cross-platform) RPG Maker MV. On one occasion, I actually made enough progress on a remake engine that I had some screenshots to show off, but I eventually ended up getting frustrated with and abandoning this attempt for two reasons - firstly, that I was being way too ambitious in regards to how the engine worked, and secondly, that I was putting too high a standard on the placeholder graphics. This particular attempt was using Lazarus + FreePascal, together with the cross-platform GL-based Castle Game Engine library (which on a side note, seems like an excellent library for anyone wanting to do game design using Pascal - from what I could see, no other Pascal-based engine even came close).
Then, recently, I started to learn MonoGame and C#, and have put this new learning (which is still ongoing - I'm often finding better ways to do stuff and thus reworking older code to use it, for example, I only recently replaced a whole bunch of complex code with much simpler code using the Linq library) towards yet another remake attempt. Or at least, that's how it started off.
With this one, I deliberately put some limits on myself regarding graphics - any graphics I design, I must limit myself (except where there's specifically technical reasons not to - so far, the only case of this is the font) to a 16-color palette (the "16 colors" here does
not include "transparent", so it's 17 if you include that). I've also made literal placeholders for cases where I haven't even made these graphics yet - so you might see in some WIP screenshots / videos that some NPCs, enemies or battle animations just show a graphic that says "Placeholder", or a blacked-out sprite resembling a human shape in the case of NPCs. I've also toned back the ambition a bit - while the battle system is still very complex, stuff outside of battles is not so fancy.
In what should have been completely predictable for me, knowing myself, the "Lemmings Plus DOS Project" effect quickly surfaced - you may remember that LPDOS (now known as Lemmings Plus I) started off as an effort to remake many of my Cheapo levels in the DOS game (or technically, rather, Lemmix), but I quickly ended up feeling more like making original content rather than remakes. Well, the same has more or less happened here - I've felt more like creating an entirely new game, rather than an improved remake of my original one.
So, what does that mean this project will be? It's going to be a new game, but in a sense, also a spiritual successor to my first one. While the gameplay will be fairly similar (of course, there will be many entirely new boss designs - though some general concepts will likely be reused, if maybe not exactly the same specific enemies), the setting, characters, story, etc will be completely new. At this stage, I'm not ready to reveal details about this beyond what's seen in preview content, but I'll say more in time.
(This is the original post where I split the topic off.So, regarding the "remake" - I realised that I was being far too ambitious with it, especially with regards to having the pixel-perfect map movement combined with my somewhat limited graphical abilities, so I figured I was better off ditching much of this.
Another thing I've realised is that using an obscure framework like Pascal + CGE could come back to bite me later, so I've decided to start again (and indeed, I've made some good progress already) using something a bit more mainstream - specifically, MonoGame. While doing so, I'm of course taking into account things I learnt from previous test code - especially what things I was doing that might be complicating things more than necessary. (MonoGame also does a little bit better in regards to cross-platform. In particular, should I actually get this finished, MonoGame offers the possibility of publishing the game to console rather than just PC and smartphones.)
The new codebase, while not having all the behind-the-scenes stuff (support for attack data, enemy data, etc) that the old codebase had so far, already has some more-prominent features the old one never got around to, like warp points between maps (or within the same map). Probably because no more unnessecary fancy stuff this time - only putting in what's actually needed to make the game work; it doesn't
have to be overly fancy.
As I do more of the planning (and coding, to some extent), I'm also getting more sure of my decision that this won't be a direct-but-improved remake, but more likely just an RPG with similar gameplay mechanics, perhaps re-using some ideas from this one (especially with regard to boss attack patterns / etc). I don't plan for the battle system (even outside of specific formulas) to be a one-to-one copy either; though it will be very similar. (One of the notable changes is that I intend to implement some form of summons, most likely an FF8 / FFX hybrid system.)