Orochi Returns

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WASD controls, click to charge and release to fire! P to pause.

(Known issues: There's an occasional bug with which you will not spawn on the map, and the camera will fly off into the distance. If this happens, hit P and restart, or just reload the page. It isn't present on all platforms.)

Help Maho Shojo-Chan defeat the resurrected eight-headed Orochi, by following Susanoo Mask to the three sacred regalia! Once you've got all three, find the glowing red eight-headed Orochi and destroy him with your enchanted gohei wand! Watch out for the oni and their fireballs!

First up, big-up to Naoko Takeuchi, as my protagonist, Maho Shojo-chan, is pretty much a direct knock-off of Sailor Moon. Now that I'm getting into 2D animation, I've been studying her techniques (and the mind boggling efficiency of her team) for a while.

I will not have the indignity to pretend otherwise, and I will be fortunate, if I ever have even a small portion, of the dedication her audience has given her. This is entirely unofficial and in no way a rights claim. Susanoo Mask is obviously heavily influenced by Tuxedo Mask, but there's pretty clearly some Anime-Rob-Zombie in there too.

Basically follow the wild-looking man in the top hat while dodging fire from oni wandering around the procedurally generated town maze. He'll lead you to a brass mirror, a jewel, and a sword; after which, Orochi the Eight-Headed Dragon will go from gold (invulnerable) to red (very vulnerable). The man in the top hat will lead you to him, where you can then kill him with five direct hits.



That's.... that's what I gots. Getting consistent cross-platform behavior with Unity is weirdly inconsistent and difficult, and there was a lot of backtracking over the last few weeks; but it served its purpose. This is part of why I'm considering switching to Godot (or possibly O3DE) if I expand on it; the core mechanics are down.



A lot of this was done in an attempt to remind myself how to use Unity (in full), for a potential teaching position. I was also a little curious, as to whether the issues it has—a large part of why I left it—are still there.



They totally freakin' are... and how. Full disclosure, I ended up using an LLM to walk me through the major differences and check on historical facts with Unity's new APIs; but that was the end of its involvement. It had no influence on the art, much of which was initially done by hand; the 3D modeling, the cel shader, the Canney outline post processing, or the music; those are things I either enjoy doing or already knew how to implement.

To give credit where it's due, the maze algorithm mostly came from a course by Dr. Penny De Byl, and the music itself which was inspired (in part) by some future funk I was listening to. I'll have to dig up the name and artist at some point.

I did go down a rabbit-hole into Shinto folklore in coming up with this idea, and may return to it with a different engine/editor. Let's just say that Susanoo no Mikoto is ostensibly the absolute GOAT, akin to Cuchulain and Hercules. There's also a lot of common folklore structure between Shintoism, and my more local New Mexican Kivaism, which is interesting. No direct ties, but the description of a kami, and that of a kachina, seems crazy-close.