The Music Room and CG Gallery are obligatory for the Visual Novel format, so no surprise there. However, one other thing that’ll make an appearance is the Touhou Mecha Database. It contains information on the various mecha, characters and terminology that appear in the story; some of it is a recap, and some of it is information that wouldn’t fit into the story, such as performance stats and equipment info for all the mecha.

We hope it makes for a richer experience all around. We have a preview video of this new feature up:

TM Database preview

We’ve made a quick update for Touhou Mecha Chapter 1– Touhou Mecha version 1.1.

The main reason for this update is because we recently discovered an image compression technique used by developers in the Ren’py community called JCC compression. Basically, it lets us use JPG images instead of PNGs while keeping the ability to use transparent pixels, something the JPG format isn’t normally very good at.

Windows download (43.3 MB): here
Multiplatform download (54.3 MB): here

The size of the Windows download was reduced from 83.8 MB to 43.3 MB!

Of course, there’s traces of JPG artifacts if you look closely while playing the VN now, but I think it’s barely noticable, especially when sprites start moving about. If this change goes over well enough, we’d like to make the compression technique the standard for the VN package. If the demand is high enough we may release an uncompressed version when the final Chapter is released.

Info, previews and downloads now have their own sections under “Pages” on the right-hand side of this blog. The full changelist for the Touhou Mecha releases is on the new Downloads page.

We’ve also made another preview video of Chapter 1, this time focusing on the intro sequence. As before, the framerate and picture quality of the videos aren’t as high as they are in-game, so be sure to pick up the VN itself as well!

Intro trailer

Touhou Tuesday is a radio show dedicated to Touhou Project music. It’s being hosted on areciboradio.com, airing on Tuesdays from 8-10 PM EST. If you’re interested, be sure to catch it tomorrow!

Hello folks, Graph here. The first Chapter of Touhou Mecha, “The Fledgling Sun God”, is out! I’d like to thank the beta testers for their comments, and you all for your patience in waiting for this game’s completion.

Windows download (83.8 MB): here
Multiplatform download (94.8 MB): here

More Game info can be found at the Touhou Mecha section of the blog.

You can see a video preview of the action segments on Youtube:

We hope you enjoy the story!

Hello all, Chapter 1 of Touhou Mecha will soon be entering the beta testing phase. We’d like to have a few people test the game before it the public release. We’re looking to make this one fairly quick compared to the ESR testing phase. It takes about an hour to run through, and it doesn’t branch like ESR, so I’m thinking of getting 3 or 4 testers for this one.

EDIT: We’ve got enough testers for this round. Thanks!

We got a lucky save in the music department for this game; OverCoat, the guy who put together the original “Ah-Eh-I-Oh-You” in Katawa Shoujo, has generously offered to compose a few songs for Touhou Mecha. He’s done quite well, and the music needs for the first Chapter are pretty well filled out. Great thanks to OverCoat for his contributions!

Meanwhile, all the mechs that appeared in the Touhou Mecha webcomic have gotten major design overhauls. Have a look!

What’s left:
-A handful of CGs
-General editing (Art, writing, SFX, animation)
-Testing

I’m hoping at this rate that we can get the game ready for beta testing by the end of March, and the finished release either by the end of March or early April. (I don’t expect testing to take long though; it still takes around an hour to run through) Until then, please wait warmly while we take care of business!

This year our holiday present is an update on Touhou Mecha; we’re making some good progress here. I mentioned in the previous update that I was considering making the battle sequences using sprites; I’m happy to report that it’s going well for the most part (just have to figure out how to avoid making Ren’py slow down with the large Yatagarasu mecha sprite). As it’s a one-man show as far as artwork goes, don’t expect animation on the level of Super Robot Taisen, but I think I can pull off something close to the mecha scenes of Muvluv Alternative (VNDB info link).

Our progress so far is as follows:

Character sprites: 100%!
Backgrounds: 70%
Mecha sprites: 40%
CGs: 5%
Music: Pending…
SFX: 80%
GUI programming: 90%

Provided I can figure out what to do about music soon, I think we’re looking at a January or February release for Chapter 1. Again, unlike Eastern Starlight Romance, Touhou Mecha is going to have periodic Chapter releases so this release will be considered more or less “finished”, rather than a demo (though we might retroactively update sprites or add new ones later).

Also don’t worry about ESR. The writers are still working on it. It’s just not as exciting to talk about random pieces of scripting. We’re just lucky to be at the point where we can work on both without sacrificing quality on either.

Meanwhile, I have an update for Touhou Mecha.

Progress

Sprites: 70% Still need to finish Utsuho’s and Rin’s sets, and do a couple of small sets.

Backgrounds: 50%

CGs: 4%? Currently, I’m looking into how to implement the battle sequence using sprites, so many of the CGs will actually turn into mecha sprites and cavern backdrops.

Music: 0%, hopefully getting started soon.
SFX: 0%
GUI programming: ~70%

See the new info page here.

Art and music wise most of the work for ESR has been done. Graph’s still putting the finishing touches on things of course, and there’s a few songs Mixtape still has in the works, but a lot of that work is all wrapped up.

What does that mean for you? It means we’ve got some things starting up alongside our ESR work. We’ll let you know more about it when things become a little more solid.