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Hello. It's nice to see someone continuing this thread, as it's always inspired me reading the ideas that people talk about here. 

I'm still pretty inexperienced with AGS specifically, so take all this with a grain of salt, and I don't know Persona, but I imagine all of that could be done, particularly as I've been planning how I'd do some things like that myself - especially adding a relationship aspect (not dating, but that shouldn't be a big difference) to a game that isn't all about it.

I can't give much coding advice, but as I see it, the basic idea of developing relationships with characters should be really simple at the core. As you interact with the characters, that interaction changes some variables (they probably need to be global) in the game - that gives you the "social link level" directly - and those variables change what interaction possibilities are available in the future. You'd check the variables in dialogues and scripts and have conditions for those to act accordingly.

Of course, this is basically the same advice I'd like to give to almost every query here about how to realise some general idea: there are some variables that determine the state of the game world, and you interact with the game by changing those variables within limits given by them, and then the game shows you a different state that you can interact with.

I also have an idea for how you might do the daily cycle thing: Make leaving some key rooms activate a script that offers you options based on what part of the day is going on. So, you might start in your own apartment in the morning. Then, when you leave it (walk to the edge of it, probably shown as a door), you're given a dialogue with options as to what to do next. You choose one thing and then go to a room or series of interconnected rooms. Then once you've been there long enough (determined by the game or your own choice) you can walk out of the front door or whatever and are given another dialogue giving you choices for what to do in the afternoon. I could see ways of making this differently and perhaps better, but this is one starting point.

Dates should be simple to keep track of using variables again.

That's where I'd start, the next step being figuring out how exactly to make AGS do it in detail. I'm sure the people who really know about this stuff can give better advice.

Oh. I always wondered what "magic pink" was. (I've been lurking here for months.)

Excellent, thank you. I'd actually wondered if dynamic sprites were suitable for this earlier, but I couldn't really see the forest for the trees when I looked them up in the manual, so I wasn't sure whether they worked that way.

So... if you wanted to combine several elements to make a sprite, would the way be to import them as separate sprites, then create a dynamic sprite and draw the elements onto it with DrawingSurface.DrawSurface?

And could you use Tint anyway by creating a dummy character with a sprite only consisting of parts that are going to be the same colour on a given character, tinting that (with saturation 100, of course), and then somehow taking the result and adding it to the finished sprite similarly to the above? Sounds more complicated, though, since if I read this right, it doesn't affect the sprite, just the character, so the only way I can see right now to accessing the result with these commands is through DynamicSprite.CreateFromScreenShot (plus DynamicSprite.Crop). And if you used that, could you have transparent parts in the resulting sprite? Okay, so maybe that doesn't work.

I'm pretty new to this, but I've been playing around with the idea of something RPG-ish too, and there's one thing sometimes done in RPGs about which I'm not sure whether it could be done in AGS. I haven't quite found a proper answer to this anywhere. So: Is it possible to customise a character's appearance by combining different elements, like hair style and eye colour and such? Like when creating a custom player character, but it could also be used for creating stock NPC appearances and changing the clothes or armour someone is wearing. Even if customisation is just limited to the initial character creation, there would obviously be too many combinations of even just a few different options for it to make sense to make a different collection of sprites for each.

I suppose there are two separate questions here: whether it's possible to combine pre-made pieces within the game to (effectively or actually) create a new sprite, which is more important; and whether it's possible to colour the "pieces", eg. just create and import one image for a specific hair style (or, well, you know, one per needed frame of animation or whatever will be needed for other reasons) but then tell AGS to recolour it when needed.