I enjoy wearing lots of hats when I make games. It's especially fun to be the artist and the programmer. Unfortunately whilst my internal programmer is relatively pragmatic, my internal artist is quite happy to waste time twiddling with the art styles, drawing sprites I'll probably never need, and endlessly tweaking the colour palette.

I almost always work with a single spritesheet and indexed colour palette, so making sweeping changes to the entire colour aesthetic of the game is as easy as changing the palette directly.

The current palette is based heavily around colours used for gold and the blue greys for the tiles were picked quite deliberately to contrast nicely with the yellows.

Lots of the roguelikes that I have built have a more traditional display with ASCII characters or 1-bit sprites where tiles aren't drawn if there's an entity standing on them. That's not really an option with this game, so the colours for objects in the foreground need to be chosen carefully, so that they are obviously not part of the background layer.

Outlining the sprites really helps with this, but the most important factor is picking colours with higher saturation and lightness values. It doesn't hurt if the hues are complementary either.

The internal pragmatist says it looks good and it's clear what's what. The artist says it looks like a generic dungeon crawler and doesn't evoke a sense of the Ancient Greek myth that we're supposed to be playing. As usual, the artist wins the concentration and I spent some time trying to choose a palette that feels ancient.

I like the washed out colour from the first option but I find that the loss of contrast that comes with it means the gold fades away into the background and that really shouldn't happen when the game is about turning things into gold.

For now, I'm going to stick to the original palette but may well revisit this in a future devlog.