WARDOGS

I believe you can't make a RPG without being able to make FF6; and you can't make FF6 without making at least a dungeon and a dialog.

This is my attempt at making a dungeon and a dialog (two dialogs even).

This was done with RPG Maker MV.

My original plan was to use it as a placeholder, then replace evrything with my own assets.

As you will see pretty fast, this isn't what happened.

I realized that making assets was hard.

Took me months to make the main character, and it killed my motivation when I realized I still had to do the secondary character AND the monsters AND the combat sprites AND the weapons AND the combat animations AND the items AND the tiles.

And then I could start coding.

So this game has one original sprite.

That's it.

It's a very good one though
What I learned
Doing sprites takes time
You probably have to do more sprites than you think
Pixelart is great, and is probably easier to start than 3D or normal drawing.

But it doesn't scale well: once you get a 3D model, every animation you make uses the same model, and cover all directions.

Pixelart means you have to do every single frame of every single direction.

It increases exponentially

every character you add means more walking/running/idle animations, for four directions, more combat sprites, more combat animations, etc.

Even deciding to add a different running animation, or to add one more frames to animation is a significant amount of work

My advice

measure how long it takes you to do a frame, a tile, and take it into account when deciding how many animations/characters/animation per frames/skill animations you want
Github project page