One of the conundrums of building a retro style game is figuring exactly what style even means. One of the things that has traditionally irritated me in the SNES Final Fantasy games is the rampant scale issues of monsters compared to the player sprites. This is understandable from a visual design standpoint: they're intersting and you are going to see a lot less of any given monster compared to your characters. It makes sense that boss monsters are huge, detailed, and memorable. However this created some issues with congruence when you have human sizes monsters that are two or three times the size of the characters themselves. 

What's the solution? I don't know yet. The sooner you run through your prototypes or admit your mistakes the less work is lost overall. Right now I have ~16px tall sprites similar to FF6, but may change this. Currently I have my sprite sheets cut to 32x32 pixels, so there's A LOT of wasted room. 

One of the projects this week was getting the sprite builder together. As it stands, I have a collection of body types and then overlay corresponding hairstyles, clothing styles (and eventually accessories) over the body. Most of these are very similar, but required a bit of tinkering. There's some repetitive work involved, but the result is a system that's fairly resilient. I can make a plate mail sprite that's specially made for the small female body as opposed to the large male body and while some of the elements can be cut and pasted, I can visually check that these things have been overlayed without poorly placed extra black pixels.

The good news is that this system should work regardless of what size sprites I use so long as I adjust the size of the file processor accordingly. The other neat potion of this is that because all of these sprites are created on launch and then create a sprite sheet, I don't have to worry about any issues like the hair getting out of alignment with the rest of the sprite. 

I'll probably toy around with a couple accessories for my existing sprites but not spend a lot of time creating new assets for that system  until I really 85% commit to a sprite style. 

Next week is shaping up to be busy but I am thinking that I am going to spend some more time working on some initial dungeon tiles. 

Dungeon (Flagstone)
Flagstone variations (3-4)
Walls 
Door (plus opening animation) E-W and N-S
Hole / Water / Acid traps. 
Rocks / Debris (3)

Most of the commands for combat have been figured out (except for Escape, I need to do that). 
I need to make some monster prototypes and do at least one more of the Behavior patterns. 
I have created directional sprites for at least one of my monsters, so I would like to incorporate the facing into its overworld movement so players could better guess where the monster is looking when it is wandering around. (Debating a sort of light cone or some other diagetic / non diagetic means of displaying where the  monster is looking)