When I was a kid, I loved SNES-era JRPGs to death, to the point where I still keep them fondly in my heart and memories.
And that’s despite being spoiled by games that feature an open world or are essentially full-fledged sandboxes of near-galactic proportions, despite the advances in graphical fidelity and in animation, making everything look and feel much better, and despite modern games not having to deal with limitations like only having 8 letters available when it comes to naming enemies or items (even though they produced hilarious results, like my old pal Breath of Fire 2 with its MeowST or CrmsnCL).

Enter my discovery of the RPG Maker series (this is beginning to sound like the start of a very badly disguised ad, isn’t it?), and suddenly my creativity flies wild.
Hey, I could make a game like that! I could use this and that and this and that and…

Alright, to make a long story short (and to not spoil any of my ideas): there are a few obstacles to overcome before I can get into any of that.
The first being the obvious (and justified) prejudice against RPGMaker games. If you have heard about those very basic Unity games popping up on Steam, trying to wrangle a few bucks from kids or people that don’t know better, all of them looking extremely similar (and really bad, to paint the picture politely), it’s the same thing, really.
In both cases, default assets are being used and it shows. Well, actually it reeks, of laziness (and lack of creativity.)

So really, that bias against RPGMaker games is a bias against RPGMaker games using the default assets, and I can’t blame anyone for that because they look nothing like the old 16-bit games.

First of all, they use a tile size of 32 pixel (tiles being the walls and floors, the parts that constitute the environment, whereas sprites are the parts that live and breathe, all the characters and enemies one can find in said environment; I’ve learned this distinction the hard way after calling tiles floor sprites at first… nevermind that now!). The SNES games all use 16 pixel tiles, half the resolution compared to the RPGMaker standard (for the VX Ace version, that is. RPGMaker MV supports up to 64 pixel per tile… how is a newbie supposed to fill so many pixel with details?!).

Secondly, the standard assets, which are also called RTP (Runtime Package) use a wildly different color palette than 16-bit games do, thus appearing far smoother, as the many in-between colors make the individual pixels disappear through anti-aliasing.

So this means using the RTP is out of question.
The very existence of this blog makes it obvious that I have decided to not use 3rd party assets. Hiring someone else to do the art for me means losing a certain degree of control, and that just won’t do.

Now what other option is there but to do the art myself.
How hard can that possibly be?

Hah…