OMORI (game)

OMORI is a psychological horror RPGMaker game developed by OMOCAT and co-published by PLAYISM.

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public Kickstarter Updates, it explains the main reason for the shift to RPGMaker MV was due to the old engine being outdated and no longer being updated.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

Emotions

Emotions are... well, it's self-explanatory. Working like a system of Rock-Paper-Scissors, Angry beats Sad, Sad beats Happy and Happy beats Angry. EMOTIONS can be inflicted on friends or foes, Such as sadness, which Increases your Defense, lowers your Speed and some damage dealt to Heart will be transferred to Juice instead. Anger which raises your Attack, but lowers your Defense. And Happiness, which increases the chance of dealing a critical hit (known as Hitting right in the Heart in-game) but lowers your accuracy on attacks.

Follow-Ups

When attacking, three balloons will pop-up, with directional keys doing something for each character, each of these follow-ups act differently depending on what level they are.

Normal Follow-Ups cost 3 ENERGY to do, which is gained by being damaged or damaging a foe. You can save up to 10 ENERGY, and you start every battle in Headspace with 3 ENERGY. Omori is the only character that can release the maxed-up energy bar at once with his DOWN Follow-Up.

References

Page is WIP.