Small progress, I touched the code yesterday in the first time in months (lol) and fired up the IDE. Starting to get back into it a little, I fixed a bug with the item system and optimized a couple bytes off it.
I'm just at the edge of the app max size now, so the next step is probably to move the last of the data out of the app (which will also help making language packs much easier).
I need to finalize how I want the opening of the game to go...That's something I had had a lot of trouble with before development stopped. I've been watching Sequelitis, a youtube show on game design and trying to work it in but it's been difficult. One of the concepts (this can be found in the episode on Megaman) is to introduce the enemy right away to give the player something to work for so I've been working that in. That particular npc script though might be a challenge.
One major weakness of my current engine is that npc's placement cannot be altered by player flag data, only their dialogue... I really don't want to add something in to rectify this because everything is so built up already so I'm just going to need to figure out something clever.