Monthly Updates: January 2021

We would like to congratulate all of our players who got through a treacherous 2020. Welcome to 2021, the year of restoration. We’ve got a lot of stuff I want to unveil for this year, so let me dust my keyboard off so I can get right to the point.

Monthly Update banners

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This gallery showed all of the Monthly Update cards from every month of 2020. You can see my art style has changed and evolved throughout. I can explain every card in detail like what I did from the January 2020 Monthly Update when that year began.

• January: Shows the Chuhou Joutai duo in the same attire as depicted in the new January 2021 card. This was also the last card to use the former art direction from the Dream Logos and Fiction Wiki days.
• February: Shows the duo dressed in formal attire. This was in anticipation for the 2020 Academy Awards, where everyone dresses formal. This month was also notable because it was the month that the Drillimation Twitter account reached 1,000 followers.
• March: Shows the duo dressed in Japanese royal attire in anticipation for Hinamatsuri, or Girls’ Day.
• April: Shows the duo dressed in Japanese school uniforms. Almost always the first four months of a year show them with Japanese traits.
• May: Shows the duo dressed in their regular attire as they do in Chuhou Joutai. This was in anticipation for the official release of Chuhou Joutai on Steam.
• June: To mark the arrival of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, we turned Kagami Ochiai into a mermaid while Driller got the shirtless treatment like Tatsuro Hozoshima. Kagami Ochiai’s mother Kisumi and younger sister Yumi, as well as Crown Princess Konata would also get turned into mermaids whenever we marked important milestones on Twitter and Instagram.
• July: In order to better fit the theme of Chuhou Joutai 2: Paraided! (the full name of this game was unveiled today), we dressed the duo in Japanese festival attire.
• August: As a way to remember my trip to Japan and Indonesia in 2019, we had to dress business casual for one day and that’s what I did to the duo.
• September: To mark the return to school for a new semester, we brought back the Japanese school uniforms for the duo.
• October: In anticipation for Halloween, we made the duo cosplay two characters that I picked or requested by fans. Driller got to be James Rolfe or the Angry Video Game Nerd, while Kagami would be Marisa Kirisame from Touhou Project. In previous years, Driller got to be Mario for 2018 and Sans from Undertale for 2019 respectively, while Kagami would be Yuyuko Saigyouji from Touhou Project in 2018 and Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. This was also the last card to use the Chuhou Joutai 1 art direction, as all future cards would use the Chuhou Joutai 2 direction.
• November: To set ourselves for the 2020 US presidential election, we dressed the duo in their winter close and made them stand in front of the White House. We also put them in winter attire the previous year and had them hold two of the three starter Pokémon from Pokémon Sword and Shield in anticipation for the release of that new game. This election was pretty tense as we did not know who actually won until four days after the election. I also suffered the most sleepless nights that year.
• December: To close off the year, we dressed the duo in kimono again and put them in a snowy environment.

Twitter banners

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Although the layout may differ from the cards, the URL to this site is now displayed on every card. The December 2020 banner now includes a link to our Patreon, as we set one up the previous month.

What’s new for 2021?

I bet you’re all tired of the above and I just want to get to the point of this post. My intentions for 2021 include three game projects, one of which is in development and the other are in their pre-production stages.

Chuhou Joutai 2: Paraided!

If in case you’re wondering, this will be the new Chuhou Joutai game’s name. If you didn’t see the previous trailer before this one, that’s what may happen during the course of the game’s plot. Of course, we do not want to spoil the story, so not much information will be presented here.

The demo will be released on itch.io on March 5, 2021. We’re improving a lot of aspects over the first game, such as the new art direction that I already mentioned earlier. If in case you were wondering, this game actually began development before the first Chuhou Joutai had even released. Since we were waiting for the new version of GameMaker Studio 2 to release, we used the allotted time to plan and design graphics. The Touhou 2: The Story of Eastern Wonderland NES Demake was designed to test the engine for the new Chuhou Joutai. Once we completed the demake, we couldn’t wait to get started. To save time and money, we realized we could just reuse the same engine. All we needed to do is come up with new game mechanics and such.

If you subscribe to our Patreon at the $10 level, you will get the first game on Steam for free. We also want to thank Jason from Singapore who helped us find all of the bugs from the first Chuhou Joutai that we left behind. We then proceeded to fix them upon request. We want the demo for the new game to be less buggy. Failing to bring in a proper playtester was a bad idea.

White Javelin

This is the name for a new, separate project I am in the pre-production stages for. I do realize that not all of Drillimation’s games have to be a fast-paced hardcore action game. I am creating this new title for Whitethorn Digital, another game company based in my area. Whitethorn mainly specializes in casually-oriented games that can be played in pieces, and this title is meant to be like that.

Building upon the success of one of our previous games, Touhou 1: The Highly Responsive to Prayers NES Demake, White Javelin will be a breakout puzzle game that retains many of the same elements found in other games such as Arkanoid. This game will also use the same art direction and sound design as Chuhou Joutai 2: Paraided!. Unlike most other Arkanoid clones, we want this title to be good. This title would focus primarily on its story rather than gameplay, which will be pretty straightforward: remove all breakable bricks to advance to the next stage.

Untitled NES Demake

We’re also in the pre-production stages of demaking the next PC-98 Touhou Project game. You can very likely guess the next game to be demaked. Just like the previous demake, it will not likely release until nearly the end of 2021.

That’s it!

That’s pretty much what we have up to this point. We hope you look forward to the world being restored thanks to a vaccine in place, along with the games that we will make to accompany the restoration.