The game I'm planning on making will definitely have a 720x1280p resolution as it's base, and I've considered making 2 sets of graphics so it can also have a 1080x1920p resolution as well, but lets start with the 720p one.



The game will have large maps with several character sprites, object sprites, many of which will be animated, and chat graphics plus the HUD on screen at once. All hand drawn of course, at the same resolution the screen is rendered at.

The game I'm planning on making will definitely have a 720x1280p resolution as it's base, and I've considered making 2 sets of graphics so it can also have a 1080x1920p resolution as well, but lets start with the 720p one.



The game will have large maps with several character sprites, object sprites, many of which will be animated, and chat graphics plus the HUD on screen at once. All hand drawn of course, at the same resolution the screen is rendered at.

You better not draw tiny pictures first, as that will only create duplicated work when you need a higher resolution and it may be even easier to draw when everything is larger and your not contrained by pixels or hand jittering. If you draw at high res first you can easily resize the pictures down to make them smaller, though try to have an integer multiple for the number of pixels.

Oh heavens no, as a somewhat experienced artist, I always draw the big stuff first, but design it so it's easy to see and understand at a smaller res too.

RPGMaker isn't really bad for what it's designed for. It's just overpriced (unless you get it on sale) and people seem to use it to publish half-cooked games more often than games worth buying. I consider it to be a learning aid, since it gives you a vague idea of what a tool set should look like and if you study the default RGSS scripts you can learn a decent amount about flow control and general game architecture, as well as most of what you'd ever want to know about how 2D JRPGs work.

It's actually a really great starting point, but not so good as a professional development platform, since RM games have earned a poor reputation in stores. Game Maker is a slightly more capable version of the same thing, really. GM seems really nice at first, but you'll soon find that dragging and dropping is amazingly slow compared to learning the GML commands that correspond to the available options. Once you're using GML you'll start wanting to make more complex systems and you'll suddenly find yourself constrained by the fact that GML is a very poorly designed language. (Seriously. If you're comfortable with RGSS then you will quickly come to hate GML.)

Rather than Game Maker, if you're looking to move forward from RPG Maker, I'd suggest SFML. Unity is another alternative, but I'm not really fond of it for personal reasons, so I'll leave that to other people to comment on. In any case, GM is not a step forward from RM. At best it would be a step sideways.

I'll take your word on GML being a sucky coding language for now, I think what I'm probably going to do is make two or three small simple games in GameMaker and see how I feel overall about the engine, language, interface, etc, and see if I'm comfortable moving into a fully fledged coding language like SFML later. (As I said, rookie coder )

And in regards to RPGM, I agree, it's GREAT for JRPGs, but it's so incredibly limited in the ways you can make your JRPG. Sure you can mod in other things, but ultimately, you really have to do JUST what the engine wants, and that's about it. But yes, I did learn quite a bit from looking at Ruby's scripts, even if I didn't absorb too much, I learned how to edit what was there pretty well, and that's pretty cool.

Try creating a skeleton game with your favorite tool and try to duplicate with gamestudio and unity within a couple of weeks, see what you like best(if you manage to finish them that is). Once you settle with the tool of your choosing try reading some howto books, packt as far as i know has lots of unity books. Speaking of which I recently came across this offer that Packt Publishing is currently running on its website. They have a giveaway till the 5th of March, where they have made learner/beginner books available for free. Each day they feature a different book, and you have 24 hours to claim that book. I found it to be quite unique, do check it out on http://bit.ly/1zNpVt0. Chances are one of their giveaway book may talk about unity