State of Drillimation: Autumn 2023

One week from today, it will be a year since the third Chuhou Joutai game released, and I’m still glad you’re following my content even after two sagas finished around this time last year. I’m also happy you’re still playing the Touhou Project NES Demakes too. I’ve already made the first three games open source and their soundtracks are now available for listening on Bandcamp.

Depending on where you live, it will always be sad when summer ends, with autumn marking the transition from summer to winter. That also means the days get shorter as well. That said, I wanted to share a few updates on what’s been going on in the studio lately, and the development of Touhou Meijinka. The main campaign is almost done, I have one more stage to go plus the extra stage, and the endings too.

What Happened During the Summer?

I was gone for half of June as a result of a long overdue trip to the UK and Ireland, and I almost got stuck there after losing my passport, forcing me to make a trip to the US Consulate in Belfast and receiving an emergency one just so I could get back home. I do not need to explain it all over again since there is a dedicated video on this.

If you plan to travel internationally during the holiday season, we do have some important information you need to know about your passport. So, let’s say you are planning a European vacation to France, including a stop in Monaco to see the famous Monaco Grand Prix. Things may change on the day you leave. Your trip starts in late May and ends the first week in June. If your passport is expiring between June and November, that could mean trouble.

Many countries require that passports and visas be valid for six months in advance. They do this in the event you have an unexpected stay. For example, if you have a heart attack and become hospitalized for a month, or you have an accident that requires weeks of treatment. And no, they will not provide service to foreigners who do not have valid passports or visas. Getting a new passport, on average, can take over a week, and for visas, up to three weeks. In my case, I was lucky and got an emergency one within a few hours. I received my new one over a week ago. I can’t believe it took three months after filing my application before I could receive it. The reason for that was the post-pandemic travel surge which also meant an unprecedented amount of passport applications from people all over America.

Touhou Meijinka ~ Song of Divine Tempest Began Development

July marked the month Touhou Meijinka formally began development. This also marked the first time where I didn’t take the director’s chair. Emiko Hosokawa is the director of Touhou Meijinka ~ Song of Divine Tempest. I would like to thank her for supporting the Drillimation YouTube channel, and E. Enthusiasm for helping make this project possible. This has been one of the most fun projects I ever worked on, but one of the most challenging. I thought Touhou Kourinden was the most challenging too, due to the fact it’s an RPG.

Shedding the director’s chair and taking on a producer role for a project is one huge change for me. My main focus is trying to keep a steady framerate of 60 FPS in all modes. Danmaku games are graphically intensive and involve huge amounts of moving objects. If there isn’t enough VRAM or memory to process everything, the framerate can drop below 60 FPS. As a result, the game becomes laggy and if the lag is bad enough, the game will become unplayable on the average consumer PC.

• 50-60 FPS is normally playable.
• 30-45 FPS is not ideal and can lead to laggy game behavior and new danmaku can load slowly.
• 15-30 FPS is when things get ugly. Common tasks such as shooting your own danmaku or collecting items become more difficult to do. Not to mention enemy danmaku generation becomes really slow to the point where the game can become unplayable.
• 1-15 FPS is essentially unplayable like the previous example I mentioned. If you ever try moving at that framerate, you’ll know what I mean.

There are two factors why a danmaku game can lag: danmaku generation and your hardware setup. Let me explain. If we look at the official Touhou Project games, ZUN has been finding ways to ensure the framerate is kept stable. He developed Touhou 6: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil using an Nvidia GeForce, which is the same type of graphics card I also use. The Drillimation Danmaku games use a proprietary graphics engine developed by Drillimation that uses fewer resources. The games are intentionally produced in low-resolution, but blown up to fit the entire screen. This allows a game to be played without eating up any additional video RAM.

The second factor is danmaku generation, which is one of the most lag-intensive things in the games. Just a few enemies spewing large amounts of danmaku can cause a system to fall to its knees. Today’s processors can perform things faster than before. For example, if you buy one of those expensive processors, build a new computer with it, and try to fight Hearthcliffe in Chuhou Joutai 2: Paraided!, the performance would be the same as the typical Intel Core i7 system. Most games can only use one CPU core, and some games make use of multiple cores, but it’s still not clear if the performance is any better. Furthermore, your system’s clock speed is crucial for playing a danmaku game.

When I was developing the original Chuhou Joutai, I saw how terrible the performance was on my Dell G7 gaming laptop during the later stages, which was the system the game was made on. This was due to the RAM of the system, which only had 8 GB, with the addition of bloated features and Chrome running at the same time.

Anyway, there was another reason developing Touhou Meijinka was difficult, and that was the director. She kept plaguing me with issues in all directions. Any time I needed information on what I needed to put into the game, I would get excuses after excuses, either saying she was too busy or didn’t want to talk at the moment. Studio Emiko is based in Vietnam meaning she is 11-12 hours ahead of me, and I have to work around the clock. I refuse to pull an all-nighter and risk jetlagging myself. That would put my body’s internal clock behind schedule and health at risk.

Additionally, E. Enthusiasm produced most of the sprites for the game. The creation of 2D sprites is labor-intensive and the time it takes to draw and animate them varies depending on the size and scope. Every playable character needed twelve images, and all boss characters needed 16 images. The enemies only needed four images, and we could recolor them to create new enemies. Touhou Meijinka is intended to be modeled after a Super Nintendo game, so each layer had to stay under 16 colors. Not to mention creating the stage backdrops was also a chore. The game uses a new tiling engine that could allow stage backgrounds to be created without using any additional texture maps.

Multiple Misfortunes Happened Over the Summer

August and September came with a few misfortunes for me and Emiko. I was supposed to attend an event at Gannon University in mid-August, but that never happened because somebody in the studio caught and brought the coronavirus here. The person she got it from ended up losing her voice. If you saw that video, I got sick with COVID. That’s what happens when you have to live with your parents at home or roommates in your apartment or dorm room. You become surrounded by disease and infection. If you live in an urban area, you’ll be surrounded by pollution.

Sometimes, those individuals can be fools. You can blame my father for my rage. That bald fool objects to everything I try to plan, keeps annoying me with his drunkenness but doesn’t sing the “Poor old man” song, doesn’t obey my orders, and eats all of my food. On the other hand, my mother just bogs me with interruptions, informing me about pointless stuff I don’t care about or announcing I got signed up for crap I don’t want. Do any of these remind you of something?

Emiko’s misfortunes ended up happening in September. During the Labor Day weekend which also coincided with Vietnam’s Independence Day, she got involved in a traffic accident. Luckily, she wasn’t injured. The other one was her diagnosis with myopia, which is where objects appear clearly when up close but far away objects don’t. It’s also no secret that I too have myopia, and I’ve had it for over a decade. I have no intent on getting contact lenses because I’m concerned about putting things in my eyes, and I think LASIK is too extreme. That’s why you see me wear those clipable shades in all of my on-screen appearances. Without my glasses, I’m essentially blind and you wouldn’t see me as the Prophet. It’s part of who I am. Also, I will never forget how many times I shot footage only to realize I forgot the shades, forcing me to reshoot. And yes, it happens.

iCloud Storage

Also, it’s been a year since I began using iCloud to store all Drillimation-related content. While it has been convenient especially when I went to the UK to access my stuff back at home, sometimes iCloud doesn’t work right. Last year around this time, I got a blue screen once when I attempted to save the sprite for a dragon boss that will appear in Touhou Kourinden. Earlier this month I had a server issue. iCloud would not sync. For the duration of a week, I had to upload and download files from the browser client of iCloud. Even after getting in touch with Apple support and repairing the Windows client a few times, iCloud suddenly worked again. Missing Windows Updates were to blame, though I still occasionally have issues.

Final Words

Anyway, the last thing that I want to say for this video is that Touhou Meijinka ~ Song of Divine Tempest will be released on December 8, 2023. It will be out on both Steam and itch.io and that being my first Touhou Project fangame on Steam, it will certainly spread more of our word. I hope you are looking forward to it. I’m getting used to creating a project where I don’t serve as the director, and it may be true if I go to Nintendo to create a Mario game. That’s all I have for this video, and I’m expecting to see you on Rainbow Road. So, I hope you’re enjoying your autumn or spring for our Southern Hemisphere players.