oia ···in development···

tinkering with the concept of navigation in games

 as of now, Oia is simply an idea of a game about navigation.
 I’ve made a draft for the main theme and characters, and a game loop structure. I wrote done, as well, how the narrative could unfold through gameplay.
 The sense of pure navigation is what I’d like to explore in this one; without making use of pre-rendered maps or any other kind of in-game helpers (like waypoints and marked points of interest).
 I’d like to see if it is something of interest (and fun) to figure out your way in an isometric perspective; in the same way that you can disable most of the UI in a game like Breath of the Wild and explore the world out of sheer curiosity - to reach some distant geographical feature that caught your eye, for example.
 when used in [contemporary] games, the isometric perspective is most commonly found in the strategy genre or in other types of games where the immediate overview it provides is paramount to understand/navigate the environment (Tunic & Unpacking come to mind).
 in case of this project, though, the use of this kind of perspective would work in the opposite direction. almost as a method of obfuscation. while it communicates very explicitly the distance between two objects (with the help of a hex grid), it limits how far you can percieve the enviroment at a given moment.
 it’s kind of counter-intuitive, but hopefully when I tell the player “there’s something out there” it makes the spatial navigation part of their brain light up. we’ll see
 and so, circling back to the Breath of the Wild example, a player would investigate the world in a specific direction or area not because they can see something is there, but because they know something is there [and they must find it].

_{· currently being developed for the web / mac / windows
· a [technical] single-player experience
· on hold while I wrap up tamagotchi
· playable on desktop & android web browsers (Chrome-based)
· work in progress}