I'm interested in connecting with other RPG developers.  What kinds of RPGs do you like to make?  What technologies do you use?  What part of development do you enjoy the most and what do you find the most challenging?  Tell me about your experiences.

I am mainly interested in the mechanical side of RPGs.  Building parties, killing monsters, and clearing dungeons is what I like best, so my work (so far) is centered on traditional dungeon crawling.  As a player, I feel that good storytelling and characterization (in moderation) help a lot in fleshing out the experience and adding context to the action, but to me the core gameplay is still the most important part.  Plus, I'm not much of a writer or storyteller, so trying to make a heavily narrative-driven game would probably not turn out well for me.  I add what I can for seasoning, but it's probably never going to be my focus.

I enjoy coding, but creating content is my favorite part of the process, because content is really what makes the game.  It is also my main creative outlet.  I find it most satisfying when the coding is squared away and I can continue building my dungeons.  The toughest part to work through is probably game balance.  Figuring out what mathematical formulas to use, how skills and powers should be distributed, what guardrails the player should have if any, and so on - this all takes a lot of research, planning, and testing.  I use spreadsheets to help me plan this stuff out.  The rules for my first game were extremely basic (intentionally so) and they worked well enough for that small scope, but I have a lot more to consider for the next one.

I hear you. Started out with roguelikes before moving on to gamebook-like CRPGs. Along the way I created a couple of rule systems that I published as such. Mostly it was about being able to play my own games. With procedural generation, even if it's repetitive, you can't rely on memorization, and instead play each game like the first time. Also, art is still involved, in room / enemy descriptions and premade map fragments, or tiles where applicable. In my case, all this resulted in a fair bit of theory writing, too. All in all, to me RPGs were satisfying games to make, and the bulk of my creative output, too. Never thought about the last one before.

I've done some rpg work. My latest was for the Dungeon Crawlers 2022 game jam. It used my Bt Builder engine which is an open source implementation of the Bard's Tale Construction Set. It works but it not exactly nice to use. The combat system comes from the original. For Color Monsters and OpenGameArt Movie Video Game, I designed the combat systems but they are both bad. In OpenGameArt Movie Video Game, I even disabled it before putting the prototype here. I totally underestimated the time needed to make that game.

I'm afraid I go in the opposite direction as you. The combats should be fun but I'm most interested in the story. I recently played Danger Crew. Most of the time the combats were not a challenge which made me really enjoy the game.