As the Steam Summer Sale wraps up and that today is National Video Game Day, I think I could take the chance to tell you about some of the stuff that never made it into the game. Like with most media, there are some things that didn’t make it into the game.
Cutscene images
These were the very first images I ever drew for the game. However, it didn’t make it into the demo whatsoever. Hearthcliffe was originally going to kill Hikari Uchida by throwing a knife at her. However, the intro got reworked after we felt it was too dark for an intro, and wanted something more lighthearted, like a description of Kozan. The intro ended up going through two revisions before it came to the one you know and see.
Susumu Takajima’s mother, Miyuki Takajima, appears in the second one. He has an annoying soccer mom. These slides were dropped due to time constraints. An extended part of the cutscene was going to show Takajima getting out of his home and down to where Kagami Ochiai is. However, he somehow bangs his head on the opening garage door for a comedic effect.
Other unused stuff
- All cutscenes were originally going to be fully animated, but that process would’ve been very expensive and time consuming.
- Star items were originally going to appear from danmaku after you deplete one of a boss’ segments. These were removed due to CPU restrictions.
- In early builds of the game, score text was originally going to appear over every bullet like in the early Touhou Project games. However, these were removed due to CPU restrictions as well. They were also responsible for causing too much lag on my system’s 8GB RAM limitations.
Other stuff that were planned but didn’t happen
- The game was going to be promoted at Mercyhurst University’s Grotto Commons, as well as The Cove Bayside Restaurant and Tavern, where the menu was going to be redesigned with the theme of Chuhou Joutai in mind. The redesign would’ve been completely inspired by the game, with the menu texts modelled after the game interface, and the food and drinks being based on Chuhou Joutai‘s characters. The coronavirus pandemic threw us off that.
- We could try that again next game.
- Meira Katsumoto was originally going to appear in the game. She was cut for unknown reasons.
- Part of the plot was also going to be completely different. Hideo Ochiai, Kagami Ochiai’s father, was going to appear in the game with an experiment going wrong. He would send the duo out to chase the thief down before ending in the usual SPASDOT stronghold.
- The Extra Stage was originally going to be completely different as well. This involved Hideo Ochiai transporting the duo into a virtual world. This was dropped as I didn’t want to incorporate any fantastical elements into the game.
- We originally envisioned Yuuto Ichika being the Extra Stage boss. However, we couldn’t get the rights to use the character, so all we did was throw whatever we felt onto the drawing board. The creation of Marie Willow worked.
- Kozan was originally going to be just a small island off the coast of Hokkaido in Japan. It would’ve been named the Kozanese Special Administrative Region of Japan (日本鉱山国特別行政区 Nihon Kōzan-koku Tokubetsu Gyōsei-ku) with a government similar to Hong Kong.
For more details on the development of Chuhou Joutai, we recommend you read the game’s development story here.
Drillimation Systems 