(Amazing thumbnail artwork by @thatonefrogxd.bsky.social)

Hello everyone, this is Kurenai. It's been a long while since I've last written a post in here.

 I personally cannot believe this is a milestone I was gonna reach, but my game has been downloaded over 500 times! It's by no means a farcically gigantic number, but it's still surprising to see that I've got that amount of people interested into trying my game. With that said, from the bottom of my heart, I thank each and every one of you for doing so!

So, you're probably wondering how's the development of my game going along, and to be very honest with you, it has been... quite slow. There were numerous factors that came into play which forbade me to make big progress on the game, including but not limited to myself working on art/music commissions (I gotta make money somehow in this world where labor opportunities are lacking, lol), having zero sparks of motivation, and most recently moving to another apartment, which heavily shrunk down the time I had throughout the days to access my PC, since I had to move stuff everywhere and goodness knows what.

Now... even when I actually sat down to make progress on my game, I really meant it when I mentioned early that it wasn't "big", since most of the changes were algorithmic rather than being content-related. In simpler terms, I tweaked some parameters, but there really isn't anything too new that wasn't seen in my game's trial version. Speaking of the latter, I have finished programming the background of Stage 4 and even composed the music for it, but it still lacks enemies and all that sort of stuff.

Coming back to the minor tweaks, here are a few that I managed to implement which I feel proud of!

I modified the items so they spawn in an orderly fashion, kinda akin to other Touhou fangames like Treasure Castle Labyrinth.

The distortion effect behind the boss has been modified to a shader that allows the details in the background to be seen with better ease, similar to the "Color" blend mode in Photoshop. 

The previous one was akin to the "Multiply" blend mode, which worked relatively well, but it was also quite ugly in the sense that it obscured virtually everything.

And lastly, here's an enemy behavior that isn't seen in the game's demo. Now they're capable of not only following a path in a dashing fashion, but also move in a circular motion around another enemy, which may result in some interesting attack patterns if used right.

==============================================

As you can tell, I have done things, but they're only scratching the surface of the actual meat of the game. With that said, I can't say with 100% certainty that the game's full release would take place sometime this year. Regardless, if I have made a substantial amount of progress on it, I'll make sure to announce the exact date and everything.

Considering what I mentioned early about Stage 4 being partially done, I'm gonna be in the look for playtesters later after I finish coding the enemies and bosses for it. For those who have a good memory, the demo's release was mostly panned at how tank-y the enemies felt and how unfair the attacks were performed in the hardest difficulty, so I think it'd greatly help me to balance things accordingly if I have a group of people who are willing to play what I'm creating during its development stage.

So yeah, that's all I have to say about my game. Now, lemme focus on something that's vaguely related.

Last month, ZUN announced the creation of Fossilized Wonders, the 20th official Touhou game, with its demo being released at the start of May. Trying the game was pretty much difficult for me, since I was moving into another apartment by the time it was out, but I was blown away when I finally played it. I liked the presentation, its confusing stone-themed gameplay mechanics, its weird boss characters and of course the amazing music that doesn't sound like something that belongs to Touhou. I had high hopes for this.

However, a few days later, there was some controversy stirring on social media on the fact that the background textures for the game appear to be AI-generated. When I first learned about this, I wanted to give ZUN the benefit of the doubt and think that perhaps he didn't know that the assets were that way, considering that he was showing a very strong anti-AI stance during the release of Touhou 19, as shown in the afterword. But then, my disappointment was immeasurable when Fossilized Wonders got its official page on Steam a few days ago, with a statement at the very bottom indicating that the game does indeed have AI-generated textures.

To think that the guy who was known for using heavily-modified stock pictures has taken the lazy route of letting a machine do the bidding for him was so devastating to me, and many other people were as well, and quite rightfully so because there are countless articles online proving how AI-generated stuff is an absolute detriment to creators as a whole. Plus, it's also extremely confusing, not only because of the anti-AI afterword he has written in his previous game, but... he got the help of other people, including his own wife, when it came to drawing certain assets in his previous games. So, if he's got a handful of friends to help him out, then what's stopping him from getting an actual graphic designer to draw the textures... it  just really blows my mind.

So yeah, taking all this fiasco into account, I am not willing to purchase the full game if it'll still rely on AI-generated stuff, but also, I promise to each and every person reading this that my game will NOT use AI-generated things of any kind!

...wow, this post ended up being much larger than I thought it would, hahaha.

Anyway, speaking of ZUN announcing and releasing Touhou 20, did I mention that him doing so also helped my own game to be downloaded? I have this graph from the analytics page to prove it.

...I know, right? It's crazy to think how official things can also help fan-made stuff like my game to be perceived, hahaha.

Anyway, now I'm leaving for real. Again, big thanks to the 500+ people who downloaded my game's demo and gave it a try. If you still haven't, then go ahead and do it!

Take care guys, see you later!