I always try to make little rpg's, but my designs always fail. Usualy I have a main game loop that executes 50 times a second or so. In the game loop it gets input, updates stuff (locations, animations), then redraws the screen. For my screen I usualy have a structure called layer than has a multidimensional integer array representing the tiles on the screen. Then I have a structure called display that is an array for three layer structures. The bottom one is for background tiles, the second one is for character sprites, and the top one is for stuff that goes in front of characters(birds, clouds, doorways). I never get to doing the battle or inventory stuff though. I am just wondering how other people would design a RPG.