oquonie

Oquonie is a textless isometric puzzle game.

You must make your way through a seemingly endless succession of rooms. You will not be alone. Your incarnations will have the help of bizaroid characters that speak an obscure language.

• inspiration
• production
• screenshots
• screenshots first version

inspiration

We made Oquonie while living in Japan. The game was our first collaborative project, and a reflection of our experience navigating a new country, with language as a recurrent obstacle. Oquonie is about being lost in a foreign space.

A big inspiration for this project was the short story 'A town without streets' by Junji Ito, about a city of endless interconnecting houses and rooms, where privacy is non-existent. To preserve the little privacy they do have, the townspeople wear masks.

production

Back in 2013, we both had full-time jobs in different studios in Tokyo, we worked on Oquonie after work, and on weekends, for a total of 6 months. It was Devine's second time programming a full game, after Hiversaires, and first time working with animated sprites. It was Rek's first ever self-published game.

Oquonie was released on February 14th 2014, on the iTunes Store. We spent many more hours on the game after the release, adding extra content and porting it to other platforms, all thanks to our collaborator and friend Rez Mason. The game was nominated for an IGF award in 2015, for visual excellence.

In 2018, as were were sailing around the Pacific Ocean, we removed the game from the iOS store in a conscious attempt to distance ourselves from the Apple ecosystem. After looking at the trajectory of the development tools, namely the bloated development environment, we did not believe that it was possible for us to continue working on our games, while at sea with little connectivity for the Apple mobile platform.

We also could not reconcile pushing for environmentally conscious action, while supporting a company that fights against the Right to Repair, creates wasteful products, and that is hostile to indie game developers. Instead, the game was published exclusively on the Itch.io store, a publishing platform in line with our values.

In January 2023, nearly 10 years after its first release, we started porting the game to Uxn. We spent two months rewriting it to target a virtual machine, we re-did all the sounds and art, and spent time fixing problems with existing puzzles while introducing new ones. The game now has a few new hidden secrets. This entire project was inspired by the game Another World's VM, and the fantastic article documenting it. It was released on April 9th 2023.

This release is a milestone for Uxn, partly because it's what it was designed to do, but until now we had only written projects too small to really test the idea of Uxn being even capable of driving projects more complex than card games. Releasing Oquonie this way, feels like we've cast it in Amber. We'll never have to port the game itself again.

screenshots

First version of Oquonie

This version of Oquonie still exists, and is still playable and available on itch.io as a download (see above download link), but it has now been superseded by the Uxn version.

screenshots first version