Xenorogue has seen an eight-month hiatus due to work, and because i was hesitant to start doing the graphics from scratch. Specially after i finished the graphics for Pepper&Carrot, that left me “exhausted” and without any will to draw.

Between the end of October and the beginning of November, i attempted to convert this game into a graphical adventure where players would use tarot cards as both inventory items and actions to perform, with the intention to submit it to the Narrative-Driven Jam #14. I could not do as much as i wanted, i did not submit it, and told myself to redo it again like i wanted before the hiatus, but a simplified graphical style—“abstract”, i call it to make me feel a bit better.

My idea is to submit whatever i end up doing at the end of this month for the Minigame a Month — DECEMBER 2023. Thus, i have restarted with the hexagonal grid i already talked about and the same three characters, the player and three sentinels, in abstract.

Just today i could add the characters’ movements through paths; not a great start to have anything playable at the end of the month. Currently it works like this:

The grid has the same layout as Shafran’s hexagonal chess because it fitted best with the window of 375 × 667 pixels that i am using—the same size as an iPhone 7.

Cells are now plain with color chosen in order to be distinguishable by most people with color-blindness, according to the simulator i used (the original is the last one, on the bottom-right corner):

To be more distinguishable, i overlay the polygon that represents each type of particle: monogon, digon, trigon, and tetragon. I drawn the digon as a spherical lune or it was too similar to the monogon. At the end, i also use four colors, because with the three i had months earlier there was too few variations and there were a lot of clusters of same-colored cells. I have chosen the monogon, even though i had to search how to differentiate a monogon from a digon, because pentagon was not “sci-fi enough”.

There is nothing that can be called “playability” yet, and it is simply a movement test, with sentinels following a path completely at random. However, in with that i feel like player would need two actions per turn or it is too difficult to attack an enemy: when you are next to them, they move away during their turn, and it seems like a game of catch.

I already published it on the web, but not yet to the game’s index page, like previous versions. I do not yet know whether i will build an Android or iOS version—it is not worth with jam games—but i am already using a mobile-like aspect ratio, in portrait mode, and the idea is that it can be playable only with the mouse, thus it should be usable on a touch screen, even in the web version.