The programs I've used are DeluxePaint II (Enhanced),
DeluxePaint Animation, Photoshop 4.0, Paintshop Pro 3.11
and Terragen 0.8.
All the tilesets and sprites were drawn using DeluxePaint II
and DeluxePaint Animation. Both the programs are pretty old:
DeluxePaint II (Enhanced) is from year 1994 and DeluxePaint
Animation from 1990. What I like about them is that they are
very simple to use and have very good tools for editing
palettes. However, since they are quite old they also have
many limitations what comes to resolution, memory usage, and
the amount of colors you can use (maximum is 256).
I also used DeluxePaint II to draw parts of the background
images. To add some extra depth to the backgrounds, I rendered
some clouds and mountains with Terragen and added them to the
images using Photoshop. With Photoshop I also added some special
effects like blur, shadows, light sources with different colors
and so on. When edited in Photoshop, I raised the color depth of
the pictures from 8-bit to 16-bit.
The background images are dithered because I had to return them
back to 8-bit (using Paintshop Pro) to be able to use them in
the game, since the game can't display 16-bit images. It's
quite a drop from 16 million colors to 256
By the way, to draw the map picture I used real pencil, paper
(with squares) and a scanner
I also took pictures of trees and stones and stuff with a
digital camera, but I used the images only as a reference
when I drew stuff.
So, does this answer your question?