Drillimation Systems to Switch to a New Art Direction

Drillimation Systems has confirmed that the company will be moving to a new art direction just before Valentine’s Day. The old art direction, which debuted with the release of the song The Ball of Pseudo Paradise from the Secret Sealing Club (Hifuu Club) album Prelude of a Joyous Feast, will be retired. This was the art direction that was said to have transformed the company in more ways than one.

This art direction was created from a modified VRoid model produced by Studio Emiko, intended to closely resemble the art direction that was used by Touhou Project creator Jun’ya Ohta. During the eight months that the art direction was in use, the art direction reportedly started to grow unpopular with fans.

Drillimation has been using VRoid for the past five years to create poses for artworks, and VRM Posing Desktop for over two years. This was done in an effort to cut costs for requesting commissions and/or paying royalties to any one company, as well as to save time altogether. According to critics, the problem with VRoid is that they are intended to be used for VTuber avatars, but some developers up the ante and use stock assets and recolors in their game without much effort put into character designs by using the same character but with different hairstyles. In short, this would be considered asset flipping.

While this art shift will affect new projects, art directions for in-development games at Drillimation will remain unaffected, with Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity and the recently released beta of Touhou Kichouden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2 being the only games to use the previous art direction. As a result, future pieces of art will use Clip Studio Paint for the creation of poses, while Adobe Illustrator will be used for the inking and Adobe Photoshop for the painting.