I regret to inform you that I have again not had a lot of time to put into this project. This entire month I expect to be unproductive due to life things but I'm still trying my best.

Here's what I've worked on:

I'm tired of calling it Untitled First Game so I'm now going to call it Zetus (zee-tis) for no particular reason. And I'm naming the protagonist Zetus Lapetus (luh-pee-tis) for no particular reason, as well.

I've also decided that I'm no longer going to prototype this game before deciding it's worth building out or not. It's my first game and I think the most important thing is to finish it. Regardless if it's good or not. I haven't seen a roguelike game like mine that has a cycling active item inventory system so at least I have that going for me.

Because of that decision, I no longer have to hold off on learning how to create pixel art! I purchased Aseprite and created my first tile set. It's incredibly basic but it's 100% mine. The tile set below is a 64x64 grid containing 16 tiles measuring 16x16 pixels. Why? Because each tile handles one of the 16 ways a slot can meet its neighbors. For now, my inventory is a perfect square so it doesn't use the entire tile set but I plan on starting the player with a much smaller inventory that they need to unlock new slots for. The inventory shape could be any shape!

To help with scanning visually, the orange dots on the tiles are the corners. The top left tile shows the tile with all corners. To the right of it, a tile that has the bottom two corners but opens up on its north side.

Related to above, I chose to work with the Apollo color palette because I love its moodiness. I may change it.

Lastly, related to my game, I'm giving Caves of Qud another chance to hopefully find some inspiration to use for my game. I love the pixel art they went with.