How OMORI Was Made and Why People Thought it Was a Scam

OMORI’s origins go all the way back to more than a decade ago. In December 2011, an artist with the pseudo name Omocat, created an illustration of a boy, who she named Omori, and shared it on her blog. Omori isn’t just the name of the boy, it’s also short for hikikomori, a phenomenon coined in 1998 by Japanese psychologist Tamaki Saitō. Hikikomori is used to describe people that have completely withdrawn from society and choose to stay at home in total isolation. The term refers to both the phenomenon and the isolated individuals themselves. According to multiple surveys, it’s estimated there’s more than a million people aged between 15 and 64 that lead the lifestyle of a hikikomori in Japan.

Unsurprisingly, Omori, the boy in the drawing, is also a hikikomori and his creator kept making new illustrations, turning it into an ongoing webcomic that explored Omori’s day-to-day activities. While a lot of the material seemed fun and quirky, some of it went to darker places. Omocat never confirmed she experienced the need for total isolation herself, but she did mention in her blog that the webcomic was a very personal project, born from a need to cope with problems during a very confusing part of her life.

Drawing has been Omocat’s passion for as long as she can remember. Around the age of four, her parents would play her a lot of Studio Ghibli movies, which started her love for anime. Since then, she began combining her two interests. Her mother wanted to encourage Omocat’s enthusiasm for art and enrolled her in her first drawing class when she was six years old. Here, she copied anime posters over and over again, learning the basics of drawing. While her love for anime really started to take shape a couple of years later thanks to shows like Sailor Moon, Pokémon, Dragon Ball Z, Gundam Wing and more, she felt she couldn’t openly talk about it at school without being made fun of.

Therefore, when she would draw comics of her and her friends, she tried to push her own style forward in an effort to hide her anime influence. Although her love for anime was pushed to the background, her creative side was thriving. So much so that she became known as “the artist” in school. “It became something attached to my identity that I was not willing to lose.” Over the years, she went through a variety of style changes to find something that works for her, but she admitted she never really succeeded. Despite taking figure drawing classes, painting classes and even 3D classes to learn maya, simply drawing anime inspired art with pencil and paper, or a tablet and Photoshop, remained her favorite way to express herself. When the time came to go to college, there was only ever one option in her mind.

“I ended up going to art college because I couldn’t imagine being anything but an artist. There was a huge stigma around drawing anime there because it wasn’t considered “real art.” It wasn’t so much the teachers, but mostly the other students. At some point, I realized that if no one else was willing to draw anime at school, I would stand out by doing just that.”

Needless to say, she leaned into drawing anime harder than ever before and completely rekindled her two passions. By this point, she had started a blog and gained some popularity already by sharing her artwork. Omocat mentioned she was never good at making friends and therefore used the internet as an outlet to build up her career. The internet provided the opportunity for her to be anonymous as an individual and instead focus on establishing her Omocat brand. She said in an interview she likes that she never had to reveal her face to get to where she is today. The character Omori was born during her years in college and the more she explored his identity online by adding to the webcomic, the more she felt he needed to leave the space he was confined in. Of course, the irony wasn’t lost on her. Creating a bigger story, a bigger adventure for a hikikomori character to explore seemed contradictory. Yet, Omocat felt compelled for him to be part of something more than the white space he had been stuck in.

In January 2013, Omocat announced she had been working on a graphic novel based on OMORI and would be an estimated 12 chapters long. What’s more, an entire OMORI fashion line was also in the works. While she was drafting the chapters however, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the story seemed too linear. Instead, she wanted the audience to be able to explore outside of the pages and help her characters make choices. Basically, she wanted people to experience the story as if they were the character instead of seeing it from afar. Omocat realized all her ideas were coming to her in the form of gameplay. It seemed a graphic novel just wasn’t the right medium for OMORI to be a part of, it needed to be fully interactive. It needed to be a video game. The only things holding her back was the lack of time she was already experiencing because of other projects and because she felt she lacked the necessary skills to make a game.

Coincidentally, during this time, she noticed RPG Maker VX Ace was on sale and without much hesitation, decided to buy it for her and her friends. The very next day her mind was made up and called her friends Pedro Silva and Jami Lynne to ask “wanna do something crazy?”, and invited them to become a part of the project. They were both very excited about the prospect of making a video game together and suddenly, to Omocat at least, what seemed like an impossible task before now seemed possible. Pedro, best known for the project Slime Girls and Jami, also known as Space Boyfriend at the time, are both musicians and immediately went to work on the soundtrack, while Omocat started planning out the game and sketching concept art.

There was never any doubt in Omocat’s mind what the right genre for Omori was. “I’m a HUGE fan of Earthbound. Nostalgia and personal preferences are a very big reason why I have decided to make OMORI an RPG. I’m not a game designer or anything. I’ve never made a game before. When I was drawing the OMORI graphic novel I kept imagining it as a pixelated RPG, which is exactly how I plan to do it. The reason it’s not point-and-click is because I didn’t envision it that way. It has to be an RPG.”

Aside from Earthbound, the team was also heavily influenced by games like Yume Nikki, Pokémon, Dragon Quest, Animal Crossing, Kingdom Hearts, The Legend of Zelda, Fire Emblem and many others. Inspiration for OMORI didn’t just come from games, as they also found inspiration in things the developers loved as kids, for instance anime shows like “Fullmetal Alchemist”, “Higurashi When They Cry” and several manga like “20th Century Boys” and “Yotsubato!”. Works by Taiyō Matsumoto also helped shape the look and feel of Omori. When it comes to the soundtrack, the team drew inspiration from Vocaloid producers such as Kagerou Project, Mr. nekobolo, Mr. Neru and many more. As you can tell from this list, most of the game’s inspiration generally came from Japanese animation and pop culture, something Omocat, Pedro and Jami all grew up with and have a close attachment to.

As mentioned before, Omocat imagined OMORI as a pixelated RPG, partially because she wanted to infuse the project with a feeling of nostalgia. On top of that, she wanted to sort of recreate the rawness of Earthbound, Omocat explained. See, a lot of the developers on Earthbound had never worked on a game before nor was game development very advanced at the time. Now, Omocat didn’t have a lot of experience with pixel art herself, but she thought her inexperience could hopefully convey the same kind of charm in OMORI as it did in the case of Earthbound. To make the project stand out more from all the other pixel art indie games at the time, she did plan on inserting her signature artstyle in various cutscenes.

In terms of the story, Omocat decided to tackle subjects that most games don’t deal with, namely depression, anxiety, fear of loss, fear of growing up and fear of change, just to name a few. A difficult challenge as these subjects require a tough balancing act to convey just right, but Omocat felt she could portray them in a realistic and relatable manner. A lot of themes throughout the game reflect personal experiences, which made the writing process more visceral.

In July 2013, she used her blog to announce her plans of turning the early stages of the graphic novel into a game. The next couple of months were spent creating pixel art and drawings for various assets, composing music and lastly, preparing for the Kickstarter campaign that was originally planned for the coming winter. It eventually got delayed to April 2014 due to the sheer amount of preparation that was needed to get everything set up perfectly for the launch. For example, the trailer alone took a ton of work according to Omocat. She drew all the animations by hand, took all the photos and edited the whole video frame by frame as a giant gif in Photoshop.

That’s when she started to realize that the workload from OMORI would put too much stress on her body and mind considering her other projects and the timeframe she had planned to release it. Creating all the art was one thing, but also taking care of the programming was something else entirely. Despite choosing RPG Maker as the game’s engine, which is one of the more user-friendly development tools, it would still require a ton of work to complete the project, especially because Omocat had no prior programming experience. Luckily, right around this time, she met an experienced RPG Maker specialist, called Archeia. Archeia has had experience with the engine since she was 13 years old and is also an active contributor to the community by sharing resources and helping to create games. She agreed to join the project and became the main programmer for OMORI.

Omocat was really relieved about Archeia’s addition to the team, as it was really important to her to develop the game using RPG Maker. Not only is she a fan of games made in the engine, she also wanted to promote the platform, because it supports and provides the tools for DIY storytelling and game development. According to her, people look down on RPG Maker and don’t consider it a valid authoring platform, at least back in 2014. Omocat wanted to prove the engine was just as valid as any other game dev engine, in the hopes to inspire others with no programming experience whatsoever to just go for it and make the game of their dreams anyway. Furthermore, she wanted to show people that video games are more than just products.

“Having gone through art school, I’ve always felt that games were viewed as money-making products instead of art; but just because it is commercial doesn’t mean that it’s not good: in fact, I would argue the exact opposite. Games do everything that art is supposed to do and beyond. It mixes visuals, writing, music and sound, storytelling, and interaction and puts it all in one package. Games are so successful at what it does that there is a whole culture based on them. As creating games becomes easier in the future, I want to get across the idea that game-making is an art medium. I am creating an art piece called OMORI and my medium is a video game.”

Omocat kept the team as small as possible. It meant more work for everyone involved, but she believed a smaller, more focused team would better keep the original vision intact.Early on in development, she came up with the idea of adding a jukebox to the game that would play songs made by various artists. During her search for musicians, she stumbled on the song My Time by bo en and immediately she felt like the song was made for OMORI. After contacting him, the song became the accompanying music to the first OMORI trailer, which was released on April 21st, 2014 along with the launch of the Kickstarter campaign. Within a single day, the team had reached their funding goal of $22,000. The following weeks, every single stretch goal was funded as well, except for the last one which featured a PS Vita port. In the end, 5,910 backers pledged more than $200,000 to see OMORI fully realized.

Initially, OMORI was intended to be a small one-year project, with backers receiving the game and other perks in May 2015. As time went on, the game kept growing in scale and the team quickly came to the realization that they needed more developers. Fortunately, Archeia, thanks to her involvement with the RPG Maker community, knew plenty of people that could help and Omocat didn’t hesitate contacting them. Omocat mostly spent the rest of 2014 organizing Kickstarter rewards, rewriting the story, writing dialogue, planning in-game quests, drawing concept art and in-game assets, as well as creating drafts for the in-game animations. It’s also around this time that she started to seclude herself more and almost stopped playing video games altogether. She didn’t want anything influencing her original vision for OMORI from this point onward.

By January 2015, it was confirmed the game would officially miss its initial launch date and was now scheduled to be released in late 2015-mid 2016. In May 2015, Archeia updated the community about major changes under the hood. For example, GPU support was now implemented to make everything run much smoother. Additionally, a custom map editor was now in the works and the game’s emotion system was also being reworked. Later that year, she also clarified the team had been very busy porting the game to the newest version of RPG Maker, which was RPG Maker MV at the time. While this was a very time consuming process, it would greatly benefit development in the long run, especially for porting the game to MacOS. Unfortunately, something unexpected happened.

The next public progress update wasn’t until April 2016. At this point, backers were starting to express their frustration about the lack of communication and even began accusing Omocat and the rest of the team of taking people’s money without the intention of ever completing the product backers had paid for. These accusations continued until the game’s release and only grew in numbers from here on out. The fact that the devs weren’t replying to people’s comments on Kickstarter and social media only led to more frustration. Omocat clarified that the lack of communication was due to the fact that she wanted to keep certain portions of the game under wraps. Furthermore, the newest version of RPG Maker had been suffering from a memory leak, as well as sound lag and kept the team extremely busy and on edge. While the creators of the engine were busy rewriting core scripts to fix these issues, the OMORI team had no choice but to halt certain aspects of development.

The new release date was now set to fall 2016, but Omocat had already acknowledged how difficult it was to gauge how long development will actually take, because she keeps coming up with new ideas to enhance the game. She ensured the community how hard everyone on the team was working and disclosed some big changes behind the scenes. A new programmer named Yami had joined the OMORI team and was assisting them with the new and improved turn-based battle system. Originally, battles looked very similar to those in Earthbound, but eventually the developers wanted to create something more unique that would make better use of their emotion system by adding new features such as a heart rate bar and combos.

Additionally, Omocat herself had been very busy implementing many types of media such as watercolor, pencil, acrylic paint, clay models, photographs and many types of digital art, all while managing to make it look and feel cohesive. The decision was also made to change all cutscenes to a first-person view, causing her to scrap a lot of art she had been working on. On top of that, the enemy art was changed from pixel art to hand-drawn animations. Lastly, they made some alterations to the story and instead of having multiple endings with very tight-knit routes, it was now changed to be more open-ended and focused on smaller individual stories rather than one story as a whole.

The months leading up to fall 2016 were spent hiring more team members to assist with artwork, programming, level design, balancing stats and so on. Moreover, no less than 150 unique NPCs and a high number of quests were completed at this stage in development. In December 2016, the team informed Kickstarter backers that they needed more time to flesh out the game and fix older plugins that were now incompatible with the updated RPG Maker engine. More information about that game’s release was revealed early 2017, along with a brand new trailer that showed off a lot of the games’ improvements. While the new trailer was a good indicator OMORI was making progress, Omocat had to confess things weren’t going as planned.

“When the Kickstarter was launched, I underestimated the amount of time to create a video game and I now know pressing such a short deadline on myself and our small team was naive and placed an incomprehensible amount of pressure on us as the release dates kept getting pushed back.” She proceeded the Kickstarter update by going into detail about all the technical issues they were still experiencing with RPG Maker and ended the message by reiterating how dedicated she and the whole team was to give players something that’s worth the wait.

“We hope that everyone understands that we are far from slacking off on this project and have been extremely busy working on the game while keeping up-to-date with everything technically. As we have mentioned before, some of us have even been developing health problems related to overworking and stress. I am aware that another release date delay will come with a fair amount of backlash, but we can’t just “pump out a game”, especially one that performs inadequately. Our team is extremely dedicated and has been working on this game almost every day for the past few years. We want to give you something that shows our work to its fullest potential, so we will continue working every day this year to bring you that experience.”

And that’s exactly what the team did. In fact, to keep up with the amount of work, more developers joined the team in 2017. It gave Omocat the opportunity to transition more into the role of a director and writer, as other team members were now creating the bulk of the artwork. Although this was good news in terms of speeding up development, certain people were worried the developers were running out of money. It had been three years since the Kickstarter campaign went live and the team had grown quite a bit since then. Not to mention the ever expanding scope of the game. However, Omocat addressed these concerns and said that funding was not an issue and later clarified that yes, the Kickstarter money had been completely drained, but she was using the earnings from selling her clothing and other merchandise to keep development going for as long as necessary.

The first half of 2017 was mainly spent fixing all the RPG Maker issuesand making sure all assets and plugins were successfully converted from version VX Ace to MV. Meanwhile, the members in charge of the art and gameplay systems took this opportunity to overhaul and improve certain elements. For instance, multiple level designs received a makeover, new pixel-art animations were added and the battle system received a new mechanic (Active Chain Skill) to make combat more dynamic. The latter half of 2017 saw the devs working hard to organize a live event in October, where people were welcome to play a demo of OMORI. It resulted in lots of useful feedback which proved essential to create not only a better version of the demo, but the whole game in itself.

In April 2018, the upgraded demo was released exclusively for Kickstarter backers. Bugs were fixed, cutscenes were polished and enemy encounters were better balanced. As for the full game, the developers mainly focused on cleaning up the battle system and menu code, as well as updating their technical documentation with the aim of improving performance and smoothing out future development tasks. Releasing the new demo to almost 6000 backers naturally produced even more feedback that once again proved to be vital for a number of changes that were revealed in 2019, such as implementing a hotkey for switching party members, improving the UI layout to be more stylistically consistent with the rest of the game, fleshing out several dungeons and puzzles, adding more sprites and hand-drawn animations, the list goes on.

Even though the team was making very good progress, they didn’t want to make any promises regarding a firm launch date just yet and instead only mentioned they were aiming for an end of 2019 release. When December rolled around, the devs revealed OMORI was finally finished. Though, it wasn’t going to be released just yet as they needed more time to test and polish up the game. Months went by with no sign of a release date. The growing number of people that felt betrayed and abandoned by the team was now at an all-time high. The presumed narrative that Omocat stole the Kickstarter money without the intention of producing and releasing a game with it, was now unavoidable on social media. Despite updating people on the development progress as much as possible and releasing a working demo, OMORI had become sort of a symbol, a meme for making fun of games that would never see a release.

Fans luckily didn’t have to wait too long for another status update. In March 2020, the creators assured development was still on track and they were still focusing on ironing out bugs and adding extra animations, extra content and other final touches. On the 30th of November, a new trailer revealed Omori’s launch day: the 25th of December, 2020. It marked the end of a string of delays, because on that day, after 6 six long years of nothing but hard work and dedication, Omori was finally released. For many backers, the wait had been worth it. The game received many positive reviews that praised Omori’s depiction of anxiety and depression, although some people criticized the story for sometimes being too dark. All in all however, the quality of the writing and tone were compared to those of games like Earthbound, Undertale and Yume Nikki, with a good balance of funny and serious moments that make for a gaming experience that players will never forget.

Additionally, the art direction was perhaps the most critically lauded, with Destructoid’s review describing it as “nothing short of phenomenal”. Criticism aimed towards the turn-based combat was mixed as some found it boring once you find a good strategy, while others called it well-executed and applauded the way it makes your party feel like a cohesive unit. Overall, the game turned out a big success and delivered on its promises back during its Kickstarter campaign and then some. 

Obviously, it was a big relief for anyone that was looking forward to OMORI all these years, but it was an even bigger relief for Omocat. She shared a heartfelt message on Twitter three days after the game’s release that goes as followed:  “I dedicated everything to OMORI. For the past few years, I’ve worked on the game from the time I woke up until the time I slept and on most weekends. I could not let myself rest until the game was done. Even through difficulties, I powered through and dealt with my feelings by funneling them into OMORI. And though some parts of the experience were incredibly stressful, when I actually worked on OMORI, whether I was programming, writing, or making assets, I truly felt at peace.”

“I’ve had a lot to say, but I haven’t shared very much so I feel bad for that. I’ve always felt horrible about grossly underestimating the initial release date and not being able to post updates frequently enough. Because of that, when people started accusing me of things left and right, I felt like I deserved it even though none of it was true. OMORI was never a scam. I always intended to fulfill all Kickstarter backer rewards. I’m happy I can say that with confidence now.”

It’s important to remember that Omocat had never developed a game before OMORI. When development started back in 2014, she was still a teenager going to college to become a professional illustrator. This, combined with the fact she had zero game design and development experience, shows how impressive it is that she was able to direct and deliver such a high quality game at all. Omocat has mentioned it’s unlikely OMORI will ever receive a sequel or other game-related spin-offs, but many other ideas outside the world of gaming are being considered. As for Omocat’s own future is concerned, it’s uncertain she’ll step back into game development any time soon, but her creative spirit is still very much alive. “After all this, I know without a doubt that I still want to create even more things… and even better things… That part of me hasn’t changed. It’s all I ever wanted to do and I want to do it forever.”