That might work out. I'd recommend testing it on some small prototype first. You could make a simple rogue like in the Unity game engine and pull it off and if you're okay with 16 x 16 pixel images there is tons of free to use public domain art out there.

My current project I am trying to get ready to release on Steam (since it was greenlit) is not an RPG. Our project we were working on until we got notification of the Greenlight very much is. I do quest creation very different from the norm there. I do everything with an NPC driven economy, need for food, need for social, need for rest, need for work. If any of these things are disrupted for long enough they could inspire an NPC to request something be done about it. My RPG though has active armies and RTS elements as well as RPG so disruptions and interesting things can and do happen in unusual ways. It makes it so it has high replay value for the developers and not just the gamers playing it.

Traditional quest based RPGs the developers usually have to test the quest lines so much during alpha and beta that by the time the game is released there is no wonder, or suspense for the developer so while it IS the type of game they would play as a gamer, at that point they are not too into their games. I tend to design so that games are fun and playable by me too and I don't exactly know what they might do.

There is a draw back to that though. It is a draw back you may have to deal with too. In linear predictable quest lines even if you have multiple passes it is easy to test for bugs. When you have emergent systems and things that can change with each game play it can be difficult to catch all of the bugs and when they do it can sometimes be difficult to reproduce as you may not know all of the various factors that lead to the condition which had the bug.

I still prefer emergent game play though, so I will be doing similar things. This RPG project of mine is likely years away. It is one of my Holy Grail type games. I made essentially a prototype within Neverwinter Nights (not the MMO but the Bioware game) where I heavily changed how that game plays, and my family and I still install NWN still every once in awhile because we get the urge to play it. So that means recreating something like it as a stand alone game without the restrictions the NWN engine put upon me is a huge goal.

My current game sat in Steam Greenlight for 570+ days and I didn't really expect it to get greenlit so we had been working heavily on building up to the RPG and then one saturday a little over a month ago I received a message that the game was greenlit. So we put the RPG on hold while we focus on this game. This is not an RPG and is much smaller in scope.