Another Year, Another Adventure

Six months ago, I found myself washed away by the Higan River as Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity proclaimed the moonrise of a dark age for Drillimation. From that moment on, it has been nothing but unrelentless searching to find a Golden Age and bring ourselves back to our former glory. Over the eleven years of Drillimation’s existence, and since the start of the development of the first Chuhou Joutai game, we have put out thirteen interactive experiences.

Even though Shining Shattering Sky ~ Reverie of Breaking Unreality has reached its completion with beta testing to start in the coming month, I will return to making a new Touhou Project fangame. Our goal now is to regain our momentum, spirit, pride, and confidence, and it will be bigger and better than before. All of our stories matter, and creating a story that will make an impact will help Drillimation on the verge of having a comeback. With Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity, the Touhou Project playerbase has never experienced or witnessed something like this, and it may never happen again.

For the first time in history, more players believed that Drillimation had headed in the wrong direction. It has become so astonishing to learn what went wrong. Over the past six months, I have done tons of research and received help from other developers who work with us on the Drillimation Danmaku Universe. My commitment now is to restore common sense, safety, optimism, and bring wealth to Drillimation so it can thrive for decades and push us into a second century. That’s now my job, and I am doing it.

The Touhou Project NES Demakes series still remains our most popular and successful series. Our next goal is to create another successful series that could match the popularity of the Touhou Project NES Demakes. What makes it more impressive is our music is the second most successful venture. I don’t know how it skyrocketed to thousands in terms of viewership. Sure, some of our listeners have converted to players, and when we need to make our games better, we will increase efforts on quality assurance in our future titles. What a job they have done in helping me crush critical bugs that could break the game.

In comparison, Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity, which many now consider one of the worst Touhou Project fangames in history, can be regarded as average in terms of its playability and unintentionally hilarious in terms of its plot. As Emiko Hosokawa once said, who would want to make a game like that? It was a big mistake for Drillimation, and as I look at the critics watching, I realize there are some things I can do to make them happy once again. The flaws players and critics find help us find a cure to fixing our problems so we don’t put out another stinker that could potentially wipe Drillimation into history.

There are answers on how we can make our next fangame the greatest in our library; they are the only way to make players stand up and applaud, and cheer for its achievements. This is not the case for Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity. It’s very sad, and things now shouldn’t be this way. As you sit with me as I begin yet another year of my life, there are many incredible things we could achieve. For the good of Drillimation, we should work together and bring back our reputation. Who knows? Could our next title be the greatest?

Every day, I am fighting to deliver the changes we need to get us back on the road and bring a future that we and our players deserve. This is a time to pursue our biggest dreams. When Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity bombed, Studio Emiko withdrew from helping Drillimation on our future projects and started the Ciel Chandelleur VTuber project. I have a dream of getting a future title directed by Hosokawa that can be leagues better than Touhou Meijinka ~ Song of Divine Tempest.

I believe that whether you are a director, producer, or designer, you can be brought in to bring your skill to a whole new level. The same thing applies to programmers, artists, and composers. They’re all very important and integral to the development process. It all depends on your merit. I am also hoping to enhance the rich diversity of the American video game industry by bringing in more people from other corners of the globe, whether your ancestral origins lie in Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, or Oceania, America is a country of diversity where the races and cultures of all corners of the globe meet. But when somebody tries to interfere with that value, that’s bad for the people. Racism and hatred will certainly never go away, and we will keep up the long battle to building a greater diverse community.

Back to Drillimation, we suffered the worst in our history this year, and I will fight every single day to reverse that damage and be the best we can. A major focus of this fight is cutting the hair back to where it was for the playable cast of Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity and the rest of Gensokyo. Frankly, our playerbase had never seen anything like that. There were characters whose hair lengths extended past their feet. And now, I am planning to assemble a team to fix our problems in 2026.

When we begin this new project, we will bring in all corners of the globe to bring in something spectacular. To further combat the long development times that plagued previous Drillimation games, we will not only be reducing the amount of code and files needed to make the games, but will also be ending flagrant waste in resources. We are working very hard. Everyone will appreciate it, I believe. We don’t want to go back to what we’ve done in the past.

As a game developer, I’ve done very well until we got to that slip-up earlier this year. There were a lot of things to learn, and should use that knowledge to fix it. You could have seen a game far worse than that. Hosokawa, unfortunately, doesn’t feel comfortable when I talk about Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity. The release was only just the beginning of a feud. I am working hard to resolve it. I can learn where we are going, and the two studios will one day join forces again. With that goal in mind, we will develop a game that can deliver great detail to our players.

We will never let anything happen again to Drillimation, which consists of doers and dreamers. Our ancestors lit the world with electricity, giving birth to electronic entertainment that the world knows today. With help over the coming year, I will lead Drillimation even higher, and forge the most advanced, dynamic, and dominant project in its history. It will create the highest quality of them all, conquer vast frontiers of computer science, and plant the Gensokyo flag in places we’ve never seen. Every single day, we will stand up and fight for the things we deserve.

We hope our next project delivers an incredible future and hopefully propel us into a golden age. We could find things that we’ve never seen before. Thank you all for being with and helping us during this difficult time.