Minimalism
Rose Chronicles is built upon the idea of minimalism. Now, there is a distinction between a lack of material versus the abstraction of ideas; fortunately Rose Chronicles is the latter. What this means for the player is there exists some degree of separation between pure numbers and what is displayed. Many RPGs (Nippon Ichi's comes to mind) stress on the importance of numerical values and will make a best effort to display as many gaudy gauges and confusing numbers to the player.
I feel that not only is this unnecessary, but it takes away from the atmosphere and the story-telling, as it forces the player to be concerned with matters that does not constitute a RPG. Rose Chronicles also has a giant backend database and a cascade of numbers, but the difference is that numbers will not be a driving force behind the game. The absence of the generic experience system and the auto-healing of all characters after a battle is evidence that the game wants to you focus on its story and atmosphere and allows the usual affair of battles to take a backseat role as only just a mini-game.
Whether you agree with my intentions or not, Rose Chronicles warrants a trial run because it boldly intrudes upon a delicate affair that most other RPGs carefully avoid.
Resource Selection
By far one of the most controversial topics in the area of Rm2k3 creation is the topic of resources. Resources are the basic media elements that constitute the graphical and auditory domains of a game. It is a touchy topic because the community is divided between those who that design their own resources (custom), versus those using resources premade by other game companies (ripped). There are debates over consistency, laziness and quality issues that I will not be discussing here.
Rose Chronicles is composed of mainly ripped resources. However, I've taken care in the selection of such resources as to avoid the association of other games with my own. For example, playing the theme of Aeris (a widely popular song) in a game might not be the best decision, as the player has already identified with the theme before and will link it to the game he/she has heard it first from, and not the current one he/she is playing. This is a cause of concern as it would mean that the current scene the creator is telling is not independent, but rather dependant on another scene the player has already seen before, taking away from the uniqueness of the game. I have listed a quick take-away list of the ripped resources that are utilized in Rose Chronicles.
Graphical - Breath of Fire series, Mana series, Nippon Ichi series, Hoshigami.
Audio - Various Japanese composers, generic RTP
Game Design
We'd all like to follow the waterfall model of software engineering and have a detailed plan from start to finish. However, in the realm of amateur gaming, this is hardly the case. Schedules become busy, interests change and communities evolve. And so the games must also adapt to the situation. Unfortunately, this places the design aspect more along the lines of extreme programming, which is just another example of improvisation.
Rose Chronicles is no different. What started out as a side project, became a main project, was abandoned for two years and prompted taken up again. The storyline has been written and rewritten and the cast transformed from their original design. The lesson here is that creating a large game that spans multiple years is no easy task, and requires supreme organization and the knowledge of scalability. Without those two tenets, games fail and are abandoned due to an aggressive upkeep that is not maintained by their creators (as demonstrated many times in the rm2k3 community).
Beyond just constructing a game, is to make it appealing to the target audience. Social research may be carried out, but it best to remain true to one's intentions, which should be to just create a desirable game as a hobby for the author. Games that fail to understand this point lose their direction and are once again abandoned due to a lack of motivation. Imagination and knowledge of the world are also key, as that is what provides games with a sense of uniqueness; and in a era where sequels are many and original intellectual property few, those points speak volumes.
Organization and Documentation
RPGs are slightly different from other types of games in that their play-length are greater and have a higher content to code ratio. For example, FPS and puzzle games are more reliant on their engines and algorithms, from the physics engine to collision detection. Classical 2D RPGs are still code intensive due to the battle system or menu system, but more effort should be dedicated to the content and resource management. From this point we see a pattern that propagates over and over again, the importance of maintaining content and the documentation for it.
One approach I do not advise is jumping directly to code without any type of planning. This approach is severely frowned upon in academia but rarely is it pertinent there. The reason being that school projects usually span half a semester or at worse, an entire semester. There just isn't enough material to justify organization. However in a personal RPG project, if one does not follow some rules of organization, it would become apparent very soon how the project can fall apart.
For example, one trend I tend to see in Rm2k/Rm2k3 projects is the lack of nomenclature for variables and switches. Even though the creation medium enumerates all variables, there must be some type of name structure for such. In "common events"/function calls, is where the majority of system code are located so I highly suggest going to that tab and documenting all code in that area. Overworld events are less important due to their nature of containing content and not code. Remember that unlike a school project, a RPG project is usually much longer in length, stretching anywhere from 1 to 5 years.