Drillimation Begins Work On Creating the Open Source Driller Engine for GameMaker

Yesterday, Drillimation Systems began work on developing the engine that will be used in its next title, and the engine will also be an open source dependency with its source code hosted on GitHub and available for download on itch.io.

The intention of the new engine is to fix the problems of past Drillimation games and earlier versions of Driller Engine. Initially, Drillimation wanted to title the engine Danmakufu for GameMaker, but pressure from Studio Emiko led to Drillimation adopting the Driller Engine name for the engine instead. The engine lifts its name from the central protagonist of the Chuhou Joutai series, as well as the title awarded to the central characters at the end of each Mythos of Phantasmagoria game.

Drillimation states that the creation of a proprietary danmaku engine is necessary to avoid having to pay royalties for the use of a third-party engine such as Danmakufu and other dependencies. A transparency report reveals that games made on the old engine took a lot longer to produce. Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity was the last game to use the old engine, and Shining Shattering Sky ~ Reverie of Breaking Unreality is the first to use a test of the new engine.

The old engine has its roots in the original Chuhou Joutai. While every game had been praised for their stories (unless you’re playing Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity) and soundtracks, the entire Drillimation Danmaku Universe has had its fair share of setbacks, including crunch culture and tight development schedules. Some of the danmaku are not up to modern Touhou Project standards.

One of the reasons for the switch was when Drillimation had begun work on Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity back in January, the promise was to improve what Song of Divine Tempest got wrong (and what also contributed to its mixed to average reception). Despite the new types of attack patterns, its director Susumu Takajima had ignored warnings from Emiko Hosokawa about the general themes of Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity which led to it being critically unsuccessful. It led to changes in the storytelling of future Drillimation games after that debacle when the beta launched in March.

The aim of this new engine is to hit the reset button and restart fresh. The challenges with the old engine go back to the original Chuhou Joutai game’s development. Following the success of the Touhou 1: The Highly Responsive to Prayers NES Demake during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, Drillimation went on to produce a string of Touhou Project fangames, including the aforementioned Touhou Project NES Demakes series, the two Mythos of Phantasmagoria role-playing games, and the standalone Emiverse titles.

Drillimation Systems was founded back in 2014 to produce GoAnimate videos, and began preproduction on the first Chuhou Joutai back in 2017 when it transitioned into the video game industry. Since then, Drillimation has remained a video game developer bent on making old technology cool again, similar to what the late Gunpei Yokoi used when creating the Game & Watch and Game Boy for Nintendo.

In practice, when a developer gets their hand on the old Driller Engine, it is missing features that Danmakufu has. Tasks like recreating the Eternal Meek spell card from Touhou 6: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil could take longer than normal. It would require two timeline files to execute properly. Interestingly, Reverie of Breaking Unreality‘s preproduction was done with the old engine in mind, but that could have caused problems when trying to implement the systems in-game for the bosses.

Many questions during development including asking how things were going, why they wanted to work on it, their inspirations and motivations, and the environment. Drillimation would implement new mechanics on a whim, and some issues with previous games were never fixed. Out of all the reviews that staff have read, common flaws that players found included gameplay being pants, subpar graphics, and the lack of replays. When it comes to a single person programming the whole game, Drillimation is committed to delivering a positive experience to players, and every mechanic added has thousands of bugs to be worked out and feedback that must be addressed.

Over the past few months, the switch to the new engine could be viewed as a potential step forward, and has paid attention to limiting and removing misogynistic practices for female characters, such as limiting how long their hair can be and tying up very long hair. Even Pokémon Legends Z-A, which released a few weeks ago, has one character with very long hair, that being Lebanne.

Drillimation’s future expectations are satisfying players with a new experience, and they still wonder why they had to endure so much to get to that point.