Last month, shortly after Chuhou Joutai 3: Three Nights of Scarlet Abscess wrapped up development and entered the post-production phase, Drillimation began work on a new project. The release of Three Nights of Scarlet Abscess will mark the end of an era.
After four years of working on the Chuhou Joutai trilogy and the Touhou Project NES Demakes, Drillimation is ready to move on. Their next project would mark a new beginning, being the start of a new franchise with a new playable character. This allowed a lot more creative freedom rather than if they were working on a Chuhou Joutai or Touhou Project demake. However, Drillimation will not give up on both franchises and may get opportunities to develop new installments in the future.
This new franchise will be pitched to Whitethorn Digital, who will handle publishing. While it will carry over some of the danmaku, a genre change would undoubtedly pave the way. While it will be set on the same timeline as Chuhou Joutai, it will take place in the Edo Period rather than the present day.
This new game will be a Japanese-style role-playing game (or JRPG, the term can also apply to western role-playing games that utilize JRPG tropes), using the same engine used to build all other Drillimation games. This means no use of RPG Maker. While that decision made it more difficult, more creative freedom was there.
The game’s plot will follow Rinnosuke Morichika and Marisa Kirisame in a typical coming-of-age story where they aim to establish a true kingdom in Kozan, and you can basically see how the legend in the Chuhou Joutai series unfolded. Below are some screenshots of the game.
This game would be the first original Touhou Project fangame produced by Drillimation and the first to be published by Whitethorn. Since Whitethorn’s philosophy focuses on low-stress and easily accessible titles. Several things would have to be changed to fit their philosophy, and the following accessibility features go as follows:
- General Settings
- The menu is accessible at all times except for battles.
- Gameplay Difficulty
- Random encounters are eliminated, and enemies appear in the overworld.
- Time stops when a character or enemy is acting during a battle. Visual cues also let players know when enemies are going to act.
- Players can choose to continue or retry a battle without much of a penalty if their entire party faints.
- Tutorials
- All tutorials for gameplay occur when encountering a new mechanic.
- Audio accessibility
- There are separately adjustable audio channels for the BGM and SFX.
- Visual accessibility
- All text uses a san-serif typeface to make them easily readable.
- All character and enemy sprites have outlines, especially during enemy attack sequences.
- Speech bubbles and subtitles indicate speaker.
- Gameplay Progression Features
- Visual cues in a built-in map help players navigate the overworld so players can know where to go next.
Drillimation Systems 