April-May Progress Report

Somehow, even though the current release only has one stage, Devil's Emergence has already received over 300 views and over 30 downloads! Thank you so much for your support, everyone! Since nobody seems to have reported any glaring issues, I've gone ahead and continued working on the trial version, with plans to backport some quality of life features to the one-stage demo. Unfortunately, however, the months of April and May were full of me resting on my laurels stress (as always) and finals (not a good excuse for me this semester), so I didn't get that much done 😓. However, progress is being made, slowly but surely!

Note that the updates listed in this post have not been released yet.

Progress from March 30 - May 12

• I've mostly managed to split the game engine (Triplicata) out of Devil's Emergence. This shouldn't change anything for players, but it will help accelerate development of any other games I plan to make, such as, say, an original game or an entry to a Touhou Pride Game Jam.
  • As a result of this, in future releases, the game executable will be named `devils_emergence` instead of `triplicata`. Sorry for the confusion!
• Some parts of Meiling's first stage were rebalanced, particularly in lunatic mode.
• "Stretch screen" is now off by default. This means that graphics won't be distorted, but the game might not fill your entire screen when maximized/fullscreened. Note that this change won't take effect if you've already played Devil's Emergence.
• The spread of Meiling's mid-level shot was reduced, making it less annoying to use.
• The tilemap flickering bug is fixed!! It turns out this was a GPU precision issue, as I suspected, but it had nothing to do with the size of the tilemap. Instead, the bug was caused by imprecise texture coordinates. Apparently, Godot ran into the same problem, so I was able to use the same fix.
• The collision code was cleaned up to remove a bunch of hacks and special cases.
• On menus and the high score registration screen, the delay between holding a button and key-repeat kicking in has been decreased.
• Preliminary text layout has been done for the cover art for the trial and final versions, complete with a cheesy tagline as an excuse to include the English part of the title!
  
  
• Preliminary support for characters other than Meiling has been added. Sadly, the shot type/graphics information is still hardcoded to Meiling, but the way I've hardcoded it should make it easy to fix this.
• Similarly, the game now supports loading stages other than Meiling's stage 1.
• Though there aren't any lasers to graze in the one-stage demo or in the current development version, the rate at which you can graze lasers was fixed. Lasers can now be grazed every 12 frames (matching EoSD) rather than every frame.
• The code for lives, bombs, and points was moved into the player rather than being in its own data structure.
• Fonts now use bmfont fnt files rather than Triplicata's proprietary sprite format, which should make it easier to replace them for fan translations.
• I found a feature in the Rust compiler that shaves a decent chunk off of the game executable's size for ~free!
• The format of Triplicata dialogue scripts (.tdlg) was changed to be more flexible, which should allow for games where more than two characters to appear on screen at once (such as in Imperishable Night, Unconnected Marketeers, and Brilliant Pagoda or Haze Castle).
• I've started sequencing the FM version of Fragrant Plants, but I still need to sequence the percussion, which is a massive pain in the format I'm using (MML). Maybe I should give in and use BambooTracker...
• `track_data.tmus` was changed to allow for multiple "music formats", which enables support for alternate soundtracks. Speaking of which...
• MIDI support has been added! This was a bit more difficult than I expected it to be, requiring me to write my own MIDI file playing library, but it seems to be working nicely, complete with pausing! Looping is still a bit rough, though.
• Meiling's playfield sprite was touched up.
• Finally, I've created a playfield sprite for perhaps one of the most obscure Touhou characters: Reimu Hakurei.
  

Future outlook

Summer break is finally here, but unfortunately, I'll probably have even less time to work on Devil's Emergence. Between trying to find a job, trying to transfer to a new university, and having to contend with the joys of living with three other people (in a one bathroom house, no less), life's going to be rough for me. On top of this, I'm planning on participating in the fourth Touhou Pride Game Jam, which will drain even more of my time in June. Nevertheless, I'll do my best to press on and work towards getting the trial version of Devil's Emergence finished.

With all of that said, thank you for reading, and thanks again for your support! See you next time!