Now

get it here

‘NOW’ is an endless top-down ‘character-action’-lite danmaku game, developed in a week for the 15th Touhou Fan Game Jam.

I had a few goals going into this; specifically,

  • I wanted to continue practicing the skills I had previously learned for Wind God Paper Girl (that being 3D modelling, animation, better code structuring, polish, and art assets in general.);
  • I wanted to continue practicing making games with polish; I wanted to make sure every action had (at least some) weight or feel to it. I used the ‘FEEL’ unity package to help me accomplish this. Hitstops and Screenshakes are used throughout, maybe a bit too much :P.
  • I wanted to make something that had a well-defined style/visual identity; I ended up picking three ‘key colours’ and two ‘accent colours’, and used those for the main player asset and UI elements, as well as the Itch.io page assets (such as the Thumbnail).

Due to the time I had to work on the project, combined with the scope being more than I anticipated, I ended up only creating two original character models for this game (that being Youmu Konpaku, the playable character, and the sandbag enemy you fight in Wave 0). The music, while I composed it myself, was borrowed from an older project of mine that has yet to come off the ground. While I didn’t get to implement every idea I had, I did get to do most of what I had set out to accomplish.

Technical Details

In a rare first for a game jam project of mine, I’m actually satisified with how the majority of the code was structured (with the exception of anything written after the 11th hour). I’m especially happy with how I structured the bullet hell / danmaku code; I think I’ll actually come back to create more content for this project (maybe even including a boss or two), since the way I have things setup would make it trivial to write new patterns and behaviours. The danmaku system I implemented was pretty simple however, and was based off of some advice from the Touhou Game Dev discord seriver

  • A very simple object pooling system that instantiates ‘bullet’ gameobjects on start, and recycles them when needed.
  • A distance-based collider script that checks if bullets are within the player’s ‘hit-box’ radius, instead of using Unity’s physics collision system (which would be a bit overkill in this circumstance). Bullet properties were defined using Scriptable Objects.

The ‘Light’ and ‘Heavy attacks used Unity’s timeline system.

Enemy behaviours/patterns were written in C#, and used Coroutines for timing. Theres probably a better/more performant way to handle this, but for my purposes I found it to work well in this context.

I try not to be shy about the inspirations behind projects I work on. ‘NOW’ is no exception.

  • The UI design was inspired by Persona 5. A friend of mine recently got me into the series, and I decided that I needed to try copying that game’s style at least once. The UI elements themselves were created using Krita’s vector tools.
  • The main combat mechanic of ‘Light and Heavy attacks’ was inspired by They Bleed Pixels, a 2D action-platformer.
  • The ‘toon’-shading and thick character outlines were inspired by the Jet Set Radio series. I personally felt they paired well with the flat / vector-art ‘UI’ assets I created.
  • While this wasn’t intentional on my part, a friend who playtested this game described it as ‘almost Souls-like’. While I’ve only played a bit of the first Dark Souls, I see where the comparison is coming from, especially in regards to this game’s targetting system and dash mechanic.
  • Of course, this game is a Touhou Project fanwork, and thus uses characters from the series.

I was initially considering implementing ‘Roguelike dungeon crawling’ as an aspect of this game, but ultimately passed, due to the scope of what I had to work on already, compared with feeling the addition of such a mechanic wouldn’t really add much in the grand scheme of things, opting to focus exclusively on combat instead. That being said, I’d like to prototype a simple pre-made dungeon with these mechanics though.

Anyways, guess I should get back to work on Wind God Paper Girl!

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