March 2024 Monthly Digest

Spring for our players in the Northern Hemisphere is starting to come around the corner. For our Southern Hemisphere players, autumn is coming for you. Today’s a big day for us at Drillimation, as the demo for Touhou Kourinden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria officially launches on Steam.

Key Developments Over the Past Month

• The opening cutscene for Drillimation’s next project is already finished.
• The Steam page for Touhou Kourinden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria is already live, with the demo now available for download.

Drillimation Systems Launches Demo of Touhou Kourinden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria on Steam

After nearly two years of development, Drillimation Systems has released the demo of their first role-playing project on Steam. The demo was soft-launched last June and the full game earlier this year on itch.io.

Even though all of Drillimation Systems’ titles have been an arcade danmaku game of some sort, Touhou Kourinden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria is a danmaku role-playing adventure that takes place over the span of thirty years of the lives of Rinnosuke “Kourin” Morichika and Marisa Kirisame, from the latter when she is born to establishing the Federal Kingdom of Gensokyo as its queen. The game was created as a way to broaden the company’s portfolio. Director Susumu Takajima has confirmed that Mythos of Phantasmagoria is set on the same timeline as the Chuhou Joutai trilogy, taking place 300 years before those games’ events.

The game is the second Touhou Project fangame released by the company on Steam. Development on this title began in the summer of 2022 after Chuhou Joutai 3: Three Nights of Scarlet Abscess wrapped up development, and reportedly lasted a year. During the early stages of development, the game was going to be made in RPG Maker, but the engine’s limitations prevented the director from implementing the mechanics he wanted. He switched to GameMaker for more creative freedom, which was used to develop all previous games by the company. The game was going to be published by Whitethorn Digital, which is incidentally based in the same area as Drillimation. The director visited Whitethorn multiple times to talk about a publishing deal, but the two companies got into an impasse as the guidelines on the Touhou Yomoyama website state that a company can only publish a Touhou Project fangame if they obtain the rights from Team Shanghai Alice. To minimize legal troubles, Drillimation chose to self-publish on Steam instead.

The game combines gameplay from multiple franchises, including Undertale, Final Fantasy, and Pokémon. It features four playable characters with their own stats, alongside over 60 different pieces of equipment and 80 different skills to learn. Its graphical aesthetic resembles games made on the Adventure Game Interpreter by Sierra. The musical score was written on the YM3812 chip to get the same feel as Sierra’s games, as well as other Western PC games developed at the time. The score is a mix of remixed Touhou Project and Chuhou Joutai songs, as well as original tunes. Unlike Drillimation’s previous games, the score takes on a classical approach.

Drillimation Systems released the demo for the game on itch.io in June of 2023. After the demo’s release, Drillimation teamed up with the Vietnam-based Studio Emiko to develop another Touhou Project fangame titled Touhou Meijinka ~ Song of Divine Tempest. Directed by Studio Emiko founder Emiko Hosokawa, the game was developed as a holiday gift for their fans and released on Steam last December. It was the first Touhou Project fangame by Drillimation to release on the platform.

Click here for more info on the game.

Statistics on Social Media Platforms

Drillimation deployed a new marketing tactic for this website, and throughout the month, the website’s conversion rate reportedly tripled – going up from an average of 1,000 views this month to a whopping 3,000 views this month. The number of subscribers also went up from 15 to 200.

Twitter

• The number of followers increased by 70 for a total of 6,170 followers.
• The tweets of Drillimation were viewed over 18,000 times.

Instagram/Threads

• The posts of Drillimation were viewed over 1,700 times, as in the previous two months.
• The number of followers doubled over the past month – up by 25. The reason for this is if you want to view recent posts on Instagram from specific hashtags, you’ve got to do one thing – follow them, and they’ll show up on your home feed.
• Not much was done on Threads over the past month. The follower count only went up by 105 for a total of 1,135 followers. The reason for this was we did not do much on the site in February.

YouTube

• The Tough Guy Alert! PC-98 remix continued to remain the top video for that month, though it drew in less viewership. Video content was viewed over 7,200 times.
• Subscribers increased by 25 for a total of 497. We’ve got to start preparing for our 500 Subscriber special.

Future Goals

The main focus of March is to continue developing the new game. In addition, Drillimation will have a booth at the Erie Anime Fest next weekend to showcase Touhou Kourinden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria as well as the company’s portfolio. Attendees may also get a chance to meet the Prophet Driller. Additionally, Drillimation must also start getting prepared for the solar eclipse in April.