@trisbee
Its ok man, you got a valid point. We came up with the idea for this game in 2017, but we haven't been working on it for a whole year. My programmer hasn't put in much, but he's a dad and going back to college so his input will probably occur when I'm almost done (then i can bitch at him to hurry up). This is intentionally a big game and I know a lot of people say not to start with one, but I'm invested in the story. Plus I think we'll have something worth playing here and I'm learning a lot along the way. This is my first time making sprite animation or pixel art, so I'm slow moving forward since its just me at the moment. Earlier in dev I had cash to support myself while I worked on this with no job, but now I have little cash and a job. I've been working doubles to free myself 3 days a week to game dev, but I'll rarely get the full 3 for that. I wouldn't mind workin on this for a few years so long as we get to tell the story we want to tell, and were funded for it. And by the end of those years, we'll have learned a crap load about how to game dev. Technically I still don't know what the hell I'm doing. Everyday is like an experiment.
I know this was a long winded response, but my direction has changed since we started this and with more time its only gonna get better. (p.s. as life's work, I also digital paint and do standup comedy. So expect some humor in this bitch)
i definitely want you to be aware of the last thing you said in your reply
"Technically I still don't know what the hell I'm doing. Everyday is like an experiment."
2 1/2 years on and off into my dev (DON'T GIVE UP) I have gotten muchhhh better than when I first started, I constantly want to go back and improve graphics, change systems etc etc- just be aware that while your are certainly going to get better the more you do it, it's a double edged sword, if you continue to reapply new ideas and techniques especially in an expansive game you will never finish have a finished game, I've seen people work on games for 7 years no lie that look great, but still don't even have an alpha demo.
In more simple literal turns, imagine drawing on a piece of paper with a pencil, your picture looks okay, but once you finished it, rather than start a new one, you felt like you could improve it by erasing and improving some lines, now imagine each time you improved the drawing you felt like you could improve it more, which would eventually result in a potentially good looking drawing with a hell of a lot of eraser marks
(which I guess could represent the toil this takes and how your game can be distorted from its original vision in the process)
meanwhile, someone else who takes what they learned to a new drawing each time, ends up with a really fun tangible representation of their journey of improvement which I think would be a lot more great to have a whole portfolio of progress than 1 nice drawing, i'm not saying you're anywhere near this point but definitely something to think about so that you aren't that 7 years later game dev