Oni 2D

Motivation

It all started with Prince of Persia. I mean the really old one, with monochrome graphics.

Then there have been great 2D shooters like Flashback and Abuse and Super Metroid, as well as melee-oriented beat-them-up platformers, more or less inspired by Street Fighter gameplay.

Right now, be it on PC, big consoles or even little portable ones, we just don't see any platformers. 3D action is all the rage.

Oni 2D is about reviving the 2D platformer genre. Flashback was great (and had much in common with Oni, actually). Super Metroid and Abuse were great. There was a great action/quest mix for Flashback and Super Metroid, and Abuse (which was pure action, very much like the DOOM of 2D platformers) had a really nice mouse-aiming system.

Take Flashback, add Abuse's mouse-aiming gunplay and Oni-like melee component, throw in hi-res graphics and the power of today's hardware, and you'll have a little retro-revolution. Fast, playable and beautiful.

Feasibility

• Platformers are relatively easy to code, they run fast, and can readily use Oni's resources
• Recording Oni's animations live against a transparent background can be done pretty fast.
• Same for the background: it won't take much to create a 2D world with textures extracted from Oni.

For a start, we can just reproduce some of Oni's levels in side view. But 2D level design is, again, much easier than 3D level modeling, so we can get totally new content (close to an actual game) really fast.

KonokoPayne may be great, Oni++ and Oni2:Oni 2 may be great, but Oni 2D, properly managed, may give us the first actual opportunity ever to fight an Iron Demon.

Wanted

• Resource extractors. Level textures are piece of cake. The major work is on character animations : rendering them in side view from within KonokoPayne is an option, but the easiest way is to do it from within Oni, with standardized perspective and resolution, and no background.
• Game content. Levels, mostly. And character interaction. The way combos and throws are handled in Oni (range, damage etc) must be carefully analyzed and made to fit 2D gameplay (relatively easy).
• The engine/code, of course. Well, I'm looking into that right now. I'm looking into a lot of things right now.