Hindsight and Evolution
I will admit this much: being a solo game developer is tough. I literally sit down on the weekends when I'm off, I either feel extremely creative or I just want to sit back and grind some stupid World Quests on World of Warcraft and get my druid prepared to do some raiding. On the days that I do feel creative, I feel more like learning new things, and man have I learned so much.
This said, I haven't started the official work on the framework for the RPG, and work on the Metroidvania has been halted because I couldn't think of a justifiable reason to work on a Metroidvania game related to this game (but I'll eventually migrate that over to a different universe entirely and I'm keeping the files so I can work on that later). I have however taken things I've learned from working on the Metroidvania (save systems, user prefs, etc.) and started the planning stage for the RPG framework. I want to make this as organized as possible because if I just start throwing C# code at it, that'll end up being a mess and there is nothing more that I hate than a mess (and believe me, with the Metroidvania, I'm going to need to set aside a few weeks to refactor some code because it is vomit inducing).
So what HAVE I done in the meantime? Well, I haven't exactly sat around doing nothing. Mostly prototyping, for the most part. I did start work on a 3D Zelda-like engine with my own 3D models, I started doing work on top-down shooter stuff based on Enter the Gungeon and Monsters and Monocles, which I used as a way to understand Raycasting better. I've even done a little work on a character customization screen similar to an MMO character creation screen. I'm not saying all of these things will be present in my RPG Engine, but with every new thing I learn, I've got more to bring to the table, and I'm excited to work on an RPG game without the limitations of an engine like RPG Maker (and I say that with all the love in he world, because it is like a vacation to play around with my lovely collection of RPG Makers).
At any rate, this blog post has gone on for too long, it seems, but I wanted to stick with my promise to have an update at least every other month (and if I promised every month, then I have a really bad memory and should learn to re-read my old posts), so hopefully soon, I'll have at least a writeup of something to share with you.