OMORI (game)

OMORI (in all caps) is a 2020 role playing game developed by indie game studio OMOCAT and co-published by PLAYISM. The game revolves around Sunny, an introverted teenager who became a shut-in after a traumatic incident 4 years prior to the game's plot. The game takes place over 3 days in Headspace (a dream realm of unknown nature that Sunny accesses when sleeping) as well as Sunny's home town called Faraway Town

Origin

OMORI originally had many side projects that featured the titular character before the game was announced. This would include Omori's blog, Omori's story, Omori's sketchbook, and an unfinished manga. These projects would eventually evolve into a game that was first announced on OMOCAT's Tumblr on July 31st, 2013; along with announcing the discontinuing of the manga. The post showed off the first sprites in the game with the four protagonists and their walking animations. The following day, a Twitter page was made to follow the development of the game. While the Kickstarter was lightly teased about on October 20th, 2013 on Tumblr, it was not officially announced until April 21st, 2014 when the Kickstarter went live. This Kickstarter is also when the first glimpse of the game with its first trailer was released. Originally asking for $22,000, the Kickstarter was met with overwhelming support and was able to finish their campaign with $203,300.

Development

The development of OMORI posed a lot of leaps and hurdles the team had to overcome that resulted in many delays. The game was originally projected to come out in 2016 but a multitude of different factors pushed this date until its eventual release of December 25th, 2020.

• Engine Change: The game originally was being made on RPGMaker VX Ace. In the public Kickstarter Updates, it explains the main reason for the shift to RPGMaker MV was due to the old engine being outdated and no longer being updated. They also explained this switch would make having OMORI on MAC OS much cheaper. As a result, however, many plugins had to be remade \from scratch due to the updates breaking a lot of the plug-ins.
• Art Style Change:

Gameplay Mechanics

Albeit OMORI is a RPGMaker game and thus could be considered simple compared to games created in more renowned game engines, OMORI make use of several plugins that completely overhauls various mechanics as well as add others that are unique to OMORI.

Battle features

In battle, OMORI makes use of a slightly different stats functions, a rock-paper-scissors style emotion system and a follow-up interaction between teammates, these are all explained in details in the Battle system page.

Gameplay features

Being a psychological horror game, OMORI uses various plugins to induce horror in the player, this includes causing glitching effects, crashes, the Hangman game, text plugins that changes how dialogue behaves, as well as a party tagging system that, under some circumstances, doubles as a stab function that works as a way to escape some areas.

References

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