Why It Took Four Years to Revive This Project

In late 2020, while Chuhou Joutai 2: Paraided! was in its early stages of development, Drillimation began working on a side project named White Javelin that was intended for Whitethorn Digital. It ended up getting canceled due to Paraided! taking up most of the resources and had to be completed by the summer of 2021.

Until now, no work has been put into this project. It didn’t get very far and the only work that was done was a debugging screen. The shelved prototype remained on the Prophet Driller’s hard drive until that hard drive crash in November of last year. The source code ended up being lost along with the code for Touhou Kourinden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria. The crash also gave Drillimation the opportunity to recreate the game from scratch by using programming techniques the Prophet learned in the years between its abandonment and the start of development, which began last month.

Preproduction on the project didn’t begin until the disastrous launch of Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity earlier this year in April. When it was clear that both Touhou Meijinka ~ Song of Divine Tempest and the other game did not meet the expectations of Emiko Hosokawa of Studio Emiko, she started becoming less involved with the Drillimation Danmaku Universe, focusing on her Ciel Chandelleur VTuber project full-time. This led to the company having to make changes to their development process by creating a game with a story intended for casual playing. The name ended up changing from White Javelin to Shining Shattering Sky ~ Reverie of Breaking Unreality.

Over the past three weeks, the game has been in its prototyping phase, and is mostly complete with the exception of enemies. This will also be the first Drillimation Danmaku Universe game to feature a stage editor, which was created to cut down on the time and costs of having to create a new room for each stage. It was a lot of work, but it should hopefully expedite development time, though the story dialogue and bosses will end up taking the most time. The game is projected to have three playable stories with 100 stages each, totaling 300 stages.

Drillimation has been struggling to find artists to pen sprites for bosses and backgrounds for the game, and when the company pitches the prototype for their partnership proposal with a potential MCN, they could help find such artists. Of course, if you want to help, you can head to our dedicated Careers page.