I've been driving myself insane with going back and forth on the graphical style. I'm still very much torn between wanting completely custom sprites and making life easier for myself by reusing RTP. The sprite you see above is my latest effort, and I think I'm just going to stick with it. It's a combination of my custom template and XP RTP with some heavy editing.
I think it looks unique enough to be memorable, but I'm not going to be spending the next 5 years making all the sprites I need for the game. It also has the added benefit of looking exactly like the portrait and the faceset.
Other than that, I've finished the last and final versions for all party portraits, as well as all the emotion facesets for the girls. Still need to finish the guys, but that shouldn't take too much time.
I've also gone through the game plan again and cut out some of the mechanics and features I was planning to incorporate. Though they would fit into the game well, they would take a lot of time to develop and implement - and they might not bring as much fun as I was thinking. The list of ideas is much smaller now, but definitely more manageable.
I've set a very loose release schedule for myself. I want to try and complete a portion of the revamp (first town and dungeon) by then and have a demo for everyone to play. It will be a lot of work, but I'm more motivated than ever.