State of Drillimation: Spring 2025

I’m currently busy getting ready for the release of Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity, which is a new Touhou Project fangame that will be releasing on Good Friday of the Easter weekend. It was even showcased at the last Anime Fest a couple weeks back.

Touhou Kichouden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2

The first thing I will talk about is Touhou Kichouden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2. The game entered open beta in mid-January, but in the two months before, I had just finished the postgame and crushed some last-minute bugs, unveiled the game at the November 2024 Anime Fest, and then had a whole bunch of technical failures and bad luck that screwed up my plans. Everything is good now, and you can sign up for the open beta on itch.io. I have the link to the open beta in the description, plus the open beta for Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity.

I intend on Touhou Kichouden for players who finished Touhou Kourinden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria. These two games form a two-part saga that tells the story of King Kourin and Queen Marisa’s origins and the eventual formation of the Federal Kingdom of Gensokyo. This is the last game in the Kirisame Dynasty saga that forms the Chuhou Joutai origin story.

That’s all you need to know, but if you’re here just to read this whole article, I can tell you about the technical problems that happened a few weeks after the game entered post-production. This is only for entertainment purposes, meaning there is nothing important you need to know.

Touhou Kichouden started development shortly after Touhou Meijinka ~ Song of Divine Tempest was completed and released in December 2023. At the time, the first Mythos of Phantasmagoria was still in open beta and wouldn’t release until early May 2024. As I’ve already explained, E. Enthusiasm was supposed to return as the game’s art director, meaning he would pen the majority of the graphics. Some graphics from Meijinka were reused in Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2, but his issues with procrastination led to me taking over and penning the graphics for the rest of the game. This game was done through a torturous work cycle that spanned ten months, meaning it started in early January and wasn’t finished until late October.

I don’t want to get sidetracked, but a lot of you guys continue to ask why we don’t offer the Touhou Project NES Demakes on Steam. Part of the reason is they are based on five of the official games, and due to licensing constraints, especially if you’re doing a fan remake of a game, we can’t offer them on the platform and are exclusive to itch.io. With the Chuhou Joutai trilogy, the two Mythos of Phantasmagoria games, alongside our standalone Touhou Project fangames, they made sense because they were special or original projects. We might do so for the demakes in the future, but as of now, we’ve made zero progress on it. It’s only a concept, and we have no idea if we’ll be able to do it in the future.

Back to Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2, after I finished programming the whole game and crushing last-minute bugs, I had barely enough time to do other important things because at the time, Mario & Luigi: Brothership had just released on the Nintendo Switch and I played it non-stop. Not to mention an Anime Fest also coincided that same weekend.

During the post-production phase of the game, I went back to making content for YouTube and other social media platforms. At the time, I was trying to get my 2024 Year-End Special ready. As a recap, I did a PC-98 Touhou-style arrangement of the entire ending suite from Super Mario RPG. It was the longest piece of music I ever arranged on this channel, I’m pretty sure you broke down during the first half of the suite.

But then, misfortune had stricken me. A couple of days after the Anime Fest, while I was working on my system on a busy Thursday afternoon, my hard drive died. My system completely froze up right in the middle of using it and wouldn’t reboot anymore. I built the computer in the summer of 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic for the sole purpose of finishing the Chuhou Joutai trilogy and Touhou Project NES Demakes, as well as the two Mythos of Phantasmagoria games and Touhou Meijinka ~ Song of Divine Tempest. Within those four years since, I wore out the entire lifespan on the M.2 SSD I was using. In short, Anders Drake Scarlet, one of the main antagonists of Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2, killed the hard drive. That’s how many hours were put into it.

Luckily, all of the assets and code for the game were backed up on a private repository on GitHub and my iCloud. I back up everything, just so you know. A few weeks later, I bought some parts to build an entirely new PC, and the time span between the hard drive failure and the building of the PC was two weeks. During that time, I was on my MacBook. I was still able to finish the soundtrack for Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity on that thing, as everything was on my iCloud. That was an accomplishment. Even after I finished building and installing Windows on that thing, it took me days to just reinstall all my software from the old workstation.

The biggest thing that hit me hard was the source code that I had backed up for the first Mythos of Phantasmagoria was not the current revision, and I lost it all after the hard drive crash, meaning we had to reverse engineer the game to obtain the source code. This was not the case for the second game, but some attack animations were not backed up, so I had to redo them all over again. Everything is good now; the whole computer crash thing didn’t affect me much other than what I just explained and taking a few weeks out of my schedule.

Even after I finished building my new workstation, I started having issues on day two. My system started crashing out of random, and I thought I may have installed something incorrectly, but this wasn’t the case. I later learned this was the result of a buggy hard drive firmware version. I updated the firmware and the problem went away, allowing my system to run normally. What a curse that was. Even things I think would be simple are never simple. It’s very difficult to know what goes on behind the scenes and how many problems we have to deal with on a regular basis.

Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity

The last thing I will talk about in this article is Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity. The game itself is largely complete and the open beta has already released, which you can play online or download. If this is your first time hearing of it, I’ll give you a quick summary of the game. You find yourself in a Gensokyo-wide scent that causes every woman’s hair to grow to the height of their body. Unfortunately for a few, it doesn’t seem to work for themselves and you have to go out and find whoever started it. It plays a lot like Perfect Cherry Blossom in terms of system.

I’ve already explained the troubles of trying to work on this game, but as a quick recap, this game almost never got made because Hosokawa thought the concept was ridiculous, while others called it weird. The story is unique nonetheless. If you’re familiar with designing worlds or even stages, it is very difficult to not bore the player. Initially, I wanted every girl who appears in-game to be affected by the scent, but for balancing reasons, Hosokawa asked me to put in some characters that are unaffected by the scent. This applies to three of the game’s bosses.

Like what happened with Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2, this game’s development also started in January, but for this year. The game itself runs on the same engine as Touhou Meijinka, so the first month of development was spent importing assets. We didn’t get the first entire stage completed until early February. The rest of the game was completed throughout that month and the first entire week of March, all in time for the fourth Anime Fest. The game’s extra stage was finished the day before. Afterward, I focused on the game’s endings.

I didn’t want to see a repeat of what happened with E. Enthusiasm during the development of Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2, so I took the role as art director again. If you thought he and I would design graphics, another person joined as a sprite artist. Curly Brace, who is on my Discord server, penned every one of the spell card backgrounds you will see in the game, except for the first and extra stages, which had backgrounds partially or entirely designed by me.

After all, I had a blast making this game. Just like Touhou Meijinka, this game will also be open source, meaning you can modify the source code or even port the game to other platforms. I’m not sure what will await me in the next three months other than the game’s official release on Steam, but there are some changes that will be for my future appearances at Erie Anime Fest if you are going. First of all, I haven’t had much engagement at my booth, so as a way to keep people at my booth for longer amounts of time, I have decided I will get a Steam Deck and port my games onto it so if you haven’t had a chance to play one of my games, you can get a chance to try whatever our latest project is.

Outro

We hope you look forward to the official release of Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity over the Easter weekend. Unless you live in the Southern Hemisphere, it will help you get prepared for this summer. And if you’re a video game fan, I’m also excited for that new theme park that’s opening up in Orlando next month, and you bet I am planning to go there this holiday season.