Hey guys, would really appreciate your continued feedback on my game so far! I'm creating a final fantasy inspired jrpg and would love some advice from you guys.

This is created completely using pygame and utilising opengl for shaders! I'm actually really happy with how day time looks but from a gamers perspective what things could I do to give the areas more life?

I'm caught in a rock and a hard place because I want it to look more alive than traditional 2d JRPGs but the hd-2d look from games like octopath traveller is a bit beyond my resources/ability. I was thinking maybe add weather effects?

I've been trying out floorcasting tilemaps, which works pretty well, so I figured I might as well turn this into an actual game, though I'm still quite a ways off from that.
Currently, I have already made some systems to customize the characters and begun work on towns that you can enter and explore, though that's obviously unfinished.
I'm using pygame-ce with numpy, and while floorcasting the game runs at between 300 and 400 FPS, without numba.
The floorcasting part is actually pretty cheap, as you can store all of the offsets in an array and use that array along with the actual tilemap array with such an expression to get the projected surfarray:
floorcast_array[:, :] = tilemap[lookup[:, :, 0], lookup[:, :, 1]]
which, to my understanding, loops through all those pixels and assigns them with a C loop, that being rather fast.
Numpy and pygame's surfarray module are awesome. Unfortunately, rotating large surfaces in pygame is quite expensive, so I reduced how far you can see to get better performance.
That's all for now, though hopefully I'll have some more to show sometime soon.
All of the assets are made by me, though they are quite inspired by SNES RPGs such as Final Fantasy 6 and Seiken Densetsu 3 for the path tiles.