I've been trying to develop a game/engine by myself for a while, and I've finally gotten things down to a point where I'm not just constantly regretting not just doing things in some prebuilt engine.

Visually, my end goal is for the engine to have games look like Nippon Ichi's (Disgea) or Sting's (Gungnir, Knights in the Nightmare) DS/PSP era games; 3D tile based environments and props, 2D sprite characters. A potentially much more expressive amount of space to work with than pure 2D, while also striking a good balance with the limits of what a 1guy dev could reasonably manage. Right now I've just about got all the bones for a basic level editor and not too much else, but it's feeling pretty promising so far.

As for game itself, I originally wanted to do basic 3rd person shooter in the spirit of Elona Shooter just to have a tech demo out, hence the ripped Elona assets for characters (just like this website wwwwww), but I'd have to draw my own characters anyways to get all the necessary angles for each sprite, so I'm thinking might as well go all out and make some short crazy touhou-like arcade thing. I'll have to develop the engine a bit further before I get too far off on the ideasguy rails, but I already have some character concepts I want to play with once I do.