Aw, thanks, appreciate it.
I do tend to have fairly in-depth main posts a lot of the time, but this one was "brief" by my standards because I had so much else on my mind with the ongoing subscribestar nonsense. But yeah, I like, and make a point to reply in depth if it warrants it. It helps that I have great fans that actually have interesting questions to answer.
On sprites, no in fact ALL of them are custom for these games, "sprites" being the actual character graphics. Proportions and certain ideas referenced from pre-existing stuff of course, but there's obviously no Mezz or Farthing or rat street thief, so that's all custom. In terms of everything else, the TILE work, that's largely pre-existing, but pulled from a LOT of sources, and often tweaked slightly. CS was 100% vanilla tiles that come with RPGMaker, GT was MOSTLY vanilla tiles, but with a few extra pre-made sets mixed in and with some tweaks. 3 has a LOT of variety and work put in there to have some visual interest while still trying to stay mostly coherent (not just look like it keeps changing into a different game every five minutes). So I'm glad that comes across, even in screenshots.
"I wonder if you'll ever had to scrap something solely because you did not have the texture packs for it?" It's kind of a back-and forth between what I want to do, and what resources are available. I pushed a LOT harder on 3 to actually make my planned stuff happen, one way or the other, but I'm still somewhat flexible to what the available resources allow, and sometimes they suggest possibilities I wouldn't have thought of too. Ha, and yes, I've mostly learned my lesson with the lighting. There IS still a lot of cool lighting in 3, but I keep a closer eye on how big of a hit it's giving to performance, and the code is a bit better optimized now. So there might be a LITTLE slowdown occasionally, but it should be very mild and rare.