State of Drillimation: Autumn 2025

It’s been nearly six months since the release of Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity. As you can tell from the visuals, we have certainly fallen into a dark age. Not just for me, but Studio Emiko as well. If you’ve played our newest game Shining Shattering Sky ~ Reverie of Breaking Unreality, you may have noticed the latter studio is missing from the game’s copyright notice. Why? A feud, actually.

The Return of Emiko Hosokawa to Discord, Albeit in Role-Play Form

As a quick recap, Emiko Hosokawa’s Discord account was hacked in the weekend before Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity had even released. She was subsequently locked out of the platform and this lasted throughout the second quarter of this year, until one day after Independence Day, when I was doing a PC-98 remix of the song The Spirit Butterfly Dances Through the Air from Touhou Houtenkyou ~ Treasure Castle Labyrinth, when I received a Discord notification for a new friend request. I didn’t recognize the name at first, but the request was from Ciel Chandelleur. It took me seconds to realize that Hosokawa had returned, albeit in roleplay form under the avatar.

Unfortunately, she could not recover her old account, so she had to start fresh under her avatar. It’s still unclear how the account was hacked, and she doesn’t recall clicking on suspicious links and we don’t download attachments from unsolicited emails. Whatever comes up, we can still make improvements to our security and still need to make sure her email address is not posted publicly. She has reset her password and we highly recommend enabling multifactor authentication for an added layer of security. Our future goal is to make sure this does not happen again. Things have returned to normal, and we are genuinely sorry for any inconvenience caused. We appreciated your patience during this difficult time.

I like to call this event her “reincarnation”. However, I don’t want to dedicate this entire video to her hacking story. Even after her return to Discord, it will probably be a while before you may see Hosokawa-san direct another title. If you go back to the start of the video, Studio Emiko decided to move away from being involved in my future projects, including Reverie of Breaking Unreality, and focus on her Ciel Chandelleur VTuber project full-time. Over a month ago, she became a Twitch Affiliate, though she has no place to collect payments at the moment.

Taking a Cue From Visual Kei in the Future

Prior to the start of the feud back in April and as early as late 2024, Hosokawa described Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity as an unsuitable idea for a Touhou Project fangame when she started getting into the visual kei field of music. Even though some references to visual kei can be found in Kiyomi Tatariya’s spell cards in the game, her theme song doesn’t match the musical styles of visual kei, though a few weeks ago I put out a remix of her theme matching that style for my fourth Hifuu album Marvelous Faceless Reflection, which is scheduled for release in mid-December. I had finally understood the intended uses for the distorted and overdriven electric guitars. The two instruments are easily confusable.

After I started watching this YouTube channel that dissects and analyzes the theory and magic that goes into Touhou Project music, the idea for remixing Kiyomi’s theme came after I watched their video on Kobito of the Shining Needle ~ Little Princess from Touhou 14: Double Dealing Character. Depending on how things turn out, future intense themes in my games may take a cue from visual kei for character designs, and their themes may be metal as I mentioned. In fact, the final boss themes for a future Touhou Project fangame for consideration will both use heavy metal in their themes.

New Touhou Project Fangame in Planning Stages

Speaking of which, we have plans for a future Touhou Project fangame, but it will be unlike the previous ones I made. My aim with this new game is to resolve the problems of previous games, especially the ones we’ve had with Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity, and create a game with a larger focus on story. It will still be a manic shooter like those two games, but with a unique mechanic influencing the spell cards you see and the bosses you fight. I’m talking about including a day-night cycle like what Touhou Kichouden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2 used. Unfortunately, production could be on a bigger scale and may take longer to complete. After some research, I decided to use a four-act structure with the first half being on the day side and the other on the night.

Given that I will mostly have the director’s chair and also serve as producer, it will be a challenge to find someone with experience creating fangames to co-direct the game by means of writing the script, which will probably be twice as long as the script for Song of Divine Tempest and Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity. I’ve already come up with the premise for the story, and I hope not to go fishing for numerous directors and producers who are willing to work on the project. If you’re interested in being involved, feel free to drop a comment.

I do want to mention that this new fangame will take place between the events of two of the games I have made, but I won’t tell you. Additionally, it will not be a non-canon standalone entry. This also paves the way for the next part of the video, and that is the development engine.

New Danmaku Engine in the Works

If you’ve played past Drillimation games, you may have noticed that the danmaku isn’t exactly up to modern Touhou Project standards. When I started work on the original Chuhou Joutai way back in the summer of 2018, my aim was to simplify the danmaku genre for Western audiences, and to also serve as an introduction to the naive or child gamer who might not know any better, and therefore be user-friendly and accessible in terms of gameplay.

After Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity bombed in reception, I decided to rewrite my engine to be more in line with Danmakufu. This was first tested in Reverie of Breaking Unreality with the bosses, and I intend to employ this for future Drillimation games. A lot of people will end up asking why I don’t use any of the other engines by other developers. This is to avoid having to pay dependency licensing fees. If you ever tried modifying any of the games I’ve made open source in GameMaker, you will immediately realize that it is nowhere near the user-friendliness of Danmakufu. My old engine would turn out difficult to use with attack patterns taking a lot longer to produce. I used to use timelines for generating danmaku; now I’m moving to putting all of the attack patterns in the Step event of enemy objects, saving me a considerable amount of time and resources.

I don’t plan to start development on this new engine until after Reverie of Breaking Unreality completes development, which as of this recording is around two-thirds of the way done. I do plan to make this an open-source dependency available through GitHub like I’ve always done for the non-proprietary and freeware games.

Touhou Kichouden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2

The last thing I want to talk about is Touhou Kichouden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2. I am finally happy that the game is out now on Steam, concluding the Mythos of Phantasmagoria duology. That journey was three years in the making, and I’ve held onto that idea for a long time, even before the first Chuhou Joutai started production. I could have a bunch of remixes of original tracks from that game to be included in the Hifuu albums I am making as well as future ones.

In case you don’t know, last summer I started putting out Hifuu albums, which are albums that focus on the Secret Sealing Club’s members of Renko Usami and Maribel Hearn searching for the supernatural. These albums consist of original tunes as well as remixes of songs from past games I’ve done, including Chuhou Joutai and Mythos of Phantasmagoria. My future goals now are to upload no more than two of the same type of video consecutively, meaning if two PC-98 originals or arranges are uploaded, an EoSD-style video will be the next one. My videos are released every Wednesday and Saturday, and the last time I solely did PC-98 content in some periods was before 2024.

As of today, my videos mainly consist of PC-98 and EoSD-style content. The other videos that release are trailers for upcoming games, small announcements, and certain tutorials. The idea for making Drillimation a mostly music channel dates back to 2021 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Again, that was still a rough time for all those who remember, and I was the one who rose out of the doom and gloom. It has certainly brought a lot of joy to me and thousands of other people who watch. I’ve had so much fun creating these types of videos. Before I started uploading in the spring of 2021, I didn’t know where I was going to go.

That’s not the only topic I want to talk about. I don’t know what games I may be making in 2026 other than that Touhou Project fangame. There are many steps that we need to take to make sure the game can be the best out of our library. The large amount of content in the game will take a while, so I’m expecting around six months of development time. I’ll let you know when development has started, and like what I’ve always done with my past games, I will always post graphics and sprites on social media.

Sequel Web Novel in Development

Speaking of Touhou Kichouden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2, I’m actually planning to write a sequel fanfic focusing on Miho Fujiwara, who is one of the playable characters. This web novel is intended to be for players who finished the entire game, including the postgame. I won’t tell you the synopsis as I don’t want to spoil the game for those who haven’t played it. It takes a lot of effort to write a book, and it will be split into twelve chapters. I plan to release the chapters on a weekly basis via Pixiv throughout the first quarter of 2026. If you’re interested in the fanfic, you should give me a follow on Pixiv. If you’re not interested, partly because you’ve never played either of the Mythos of Phantasmagoria games, you don’t have to worry. Nevertheless, it would help as my Pixiv page needs to grow.

Two Misfortunes in September

Speaking of Pixiv, if you thought this video was over, you’re wrong because I got scammed last month. Both Pixiv and the Federal Trade Commission are investigating a new phishing scheme on the site involving fake security warning messages. I ended up clicking on the link in the message without even knowing it, and in an unfortunate twist, a scammer got ahold of my debit card information. This forced me to lock and close down the card before any damage could be done. It led to my card being replaced, and I had to move nearly all of my payment methods to PayPal until my new card arrived.

Scammers notify victims, who happened to be me in this case, and attempt to get you to act by means of securing your account and verifying my identity through credit card information, all under the fraudulent link. This is becoming a growing trend among hackers, and the message appears to come from Pixiv support by claiming the added security is very convincing. The main problem is Pixiv doesn’t even have a spam folder to begin with, though you can report and block the user.

Pixiv never sends unsolicited messages asking users for credit card information or account passwords. Instead, you can enable multifactor authentication via account settings. If you use Pixiv and don’t want to fall victim to the same scam like I did, I do have a number of precautions you should take to secure yourself. This includes reporting the spam messages to Pixiv like I did, not responding to requests in the messages, not entering your password or credit card information after clicking the link, being aware of urgent-sounding messages, and not clicking on unsolicited links.

Additionally, I ended up facing another misfortune in less than a week and it concerns my glasses. I got my current pair of glasses half a decade ago during the pandemic. One Wednesday morning while I was trying to clean my lenses, they were so old that the bridge actually snapped, causing me to go blind for two and a half days while I had to order a new frame. I’m now back to normal, but the problem is the majority of eyeglasses frames in the world are made of plastic, and it becomes brittle over time, making them more prone to breaking. This is why you should get a new pair every few years, unless you go metal, which lasts a lot longer.

That’s It

Anyway, after everything I’ve said, that’s about it for this video. These types of videos take me a while to write and record, and I wanted to make sure everything was factually correct. I also thank Hosokawa-san for reading through it and making necessary corrections. That said, given the difficulties we’ve all faced this year, let’s finish it off strong and smooth, and I hope to be at Super Nintendo World and back this holiday season.