OOLO News

“Hang on a sec. Haven’t I seen this exact genre of little guy before?” was my reaction upon encountering the yellow-eyed, hat-shrouded mage of isometric adventure Oolo. Some quick internet sleuthing turned up this lovely bit of art featuring Final Fantasy 9’s Vivi, Journey’s Traveller, and He-Man’s Orko. It’s a great feeling to begin your week identifying an archetype of diminutive magician, and I hope it becomes a regular occurrence. Another pleasant discovery was Oolo itself, which you can discover yourself through the shrouded magic of this link to it’s free demo.

(Do I need to keep writing ‘free demo’, by the way? I tend to alternate. It’s obviously redundant but I feel writing ‘free’ gives it a certain gravitas. Free tax rebate. Free sunrise. Free oxygen. It makes things sound better.)

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A small but important update today:

• "Blocks" room tweaked to allow more flexibility in jump timing.
  
• ESC key now brings up the menu on Keyboard controls.
  

- Minor update to credits and attributions.

The first update of the OOLO Demo is here! This is primarily a bugfix patch to make your demo-playing experience even more polished!

Client updates:
- Map controls now display properly in the button bar along the bottom of the screen when viewing the full map.

Bugs addressed:
- Crash with no gamepad connected in certain situations.
- Player would warp to undefined location when saying No to the initial input confirmation popup.
- Map state would not properly reset in certain situations.
- Collected artifacts would not properly reset between loading games in certain situations.
- Vanishing floors would not trigger in certain situations.
- Assorted text alignment and typos.

Thank you for your patience while we worked to address these issues!

Last time we looked at what, exactly OOLO is. This time let's take a look at some of the quality of life improvements OOLO is making to the classic isometric adventure genre.

[h2]Controls[/h2]

First is the control scheme. The classic isometric adventure games were played with digital gamepads or keyboards, meaning you were generally restricted to pushing up, down, left, or right. But with the isometric perspective, that required you to get used to "up" not necessarily going straight up the screen, but instead at some developer-determined diagonal.

OOLO is still an isometric game at heart, and supports this classic controller scheme by default, but the first choice you're presented with (both in the upcoming demo and the final game) is what direction you want up to go.

And there's a very quick, easy way to test it out:


Here you can toggle the movement in real time and see what feels right to you before setting off on your journey. You can also go into the options screen and adjust this at any time if it doesn't feel right.

[h2]Camera[/h2]

Another thing that could sometimes vex players in the classic isometric adventures is understanding exactly where in the world a platform was. Due partly to a lack of dynamic lighting and partly to the forced orthographic projection, platforms that looked like they were just one step ahead of you could actually be far above or below, leading you to an untimely demise.

While the perspective is definitely a big part of the charm of these games, OOLO allows you to rotate the camera--within certain limits--to enable you to check perspective any time you want.



In addition there are shadows--the player has a shadow that's always directly down, as do most enemies and moving objects. This is in addition to the normal lighting, to ensure you always know precisely what is directly beneath you. Use this to your advantage in tricky situations!


[h2]Minimap[/h2]

While many isometric adventure games had maps, they generally required you to go to a separate screen to see them. While OOLO does have a full screen map, there's also a minimap displayed at all times showing where you are in the room, as well as the rooms in your local vicinity. The colors of the walls are important, too. Green rooms have Soul Fonts where you can save and refresh your lives. Cyan rooms indicate where you can go up or down to a different "floor" of the map. And the blue rooms... well, you'll have to figure that one out on your own!



The map can also display indicators showing where important items are--think of them like a compass leading you to new abilities!


[h2]What's next?[/h2]

Next time we'll take a look at some of the many varied environments of OOLO and the sorts of hazards and puzzles they contain, as well as look a bit at the lore of this game and the world it's set in.

For now, be sure to wishlist OOLO to be notified as soon as the Demo is available!

Ben "dariakus" Brooks