itch.io

I do remember The Way! I remember having my mind blown by it in like 2004. I also mentioned it on r/rpgmaker just the other day.

At this point after decades of RM obsession, my collection of other people's pixels is so vast and well curated (organized not just by type, format, and style but also by what I have the rights to use commercially and artist credits) that learning to pixel myself would almost feel like wasted effort. Also to be honest I've never had even the slightest artistic aptitude or inclination, no drawing experience whatsoever outside of doodling (very, very badly) in grade school, some people can draw a more or less perfect circle freehand but I'm one of those people in the other extreme who genuinely struggles to draw a straight line using a ruler. I did take five or six months last year to finally learn GODOT, and that WAS a good investment of time. 

I can cludge together just about anything I need from my archive of (*checks notes*) 23.1 GB in 292,012 files across 23,481 folders of game dev assets plus the stuff on here (with new stuff coming out all the time, this website is pretty great) I haven't yet hoarded. My current project is the first one in recent memory to not use either character sprites nor tilesets at all as it's a first person turn based dungeon crawler/JRPG/VN hybrid, but I'm still (enjoyably) spending tons of dev time "frankenspriting" the VN style busts and front view enemy graphics.

Amen to the rest of what you've said. The people actually making something like a living in this space definitely seem like the ones selling assets, not the ones actually making games. It's a real "if you want to make money during a gold rush, don't pan for gold, sell picks and shovels" type deal. Anyway sorry to fill up your page with mostly irrelevant words, but thanks for chatting!