This is a devlog about Touhou Jam 6, our very first gamejam!

We built this game as a team of 4:

You can play and rate the game here:

https://itch.io/jam/touhou-jam-16/rate/3989974

Background

We are all touhou fans. lumiere and cheese play the games, me and amai are just fans. I've known about touhou gamejam from playing this dope ass sunflower game: https://noeticnightjar.itch.io/yuuka-souls

Ideating

lumiere had the idea to setup the game to be revolved around Cirno collecting ice-cream while avoiding bullets from an angry Reimu. cheese wanted to incorporate gameplay similar to papa's scooperia.

The gameplay loop was to be established as:

Collect ingredients on the floor while running away from an angry
Create ice creams to sell to customers

Initial designs

This was the inital mockup lumiere drew: initial There is a left safe zone that is a protected area from Reimu. You are able to create ice cream in this zone.

initial Upon entering the left zone, you are given this ice cream creation screen.

I workshopped an alternate layout for the initial screen that involved setting the workbench at the bottom of the screen, so that the game can be arranged more like a traditional bullet hell.

initial The main issue with this is that, most of the screen real-estate is not being used.

So we scrapped this, and used the initial left-right full screen design.

Day 0

In this day we:

Developed a few assets
Came up with game name
Came up with excalidraw

Assets

We drew a first tilemap for later use, we all had midterms to complete, so we decided it would be best to finish a portion of assets beforehand.

Excalidraw

We setup an excalidraw instance to outline the project dependencies and the main gameplay items we want.

https://excalidraw.com/#json=rmYSAvij8ssxocIhIj-_F,pjIHSvDQVkQc1ZEv0BvPKg

We decided against the scooping cream in our first image. Instead, we work with soft serve ice cream.

Initially, we thought of the ice-cream creation to be split into two screens. concrete

The first screen involved adding the base cream and cone.

The second screen involved adding the specific toppings and doing a 'Cirno Perfect Freeze' at the end before submitting the order.

Game Name

We had a few ideas:

Unarguable Ice in Red Market
Blue Baka Swirlaria
Cirno Happening
Cirnos Swirlaria

Extra

I spent the week trying to learn FLStudio and composing for a touhou style game. Well, I didnt end up doing this since I know jack shit about music, but I learned a lot, especially from This Video Series

Day 1

Setup the basic ice-cream table making process
Setup main menu page
Setup main overworld

overworld

This is the overworld portion developed by lumiere:

Table Menu

I was in charge of setting up the table section. I setup a method to generate a cone, but the real trouble came in adding the cream.

I thought the most optimized method was to use particles. Godot's particle engine allows for 1M+ particles to be ran on the GPU, but the real issue is that particles cannot collide with eachother.

Well, anyways I used rigid bodies. There is no optimization to be had here. Anything will collisions must be ran on the CPU.

I also managed to setup a small ordering system.

Day 2

New assets
Ordering competion
Work on table
Work on overworld
Global states and signals

New Assets

cheese made new assets, they are pretty nice:

I took this screenshot of it being adapted to the ice-cream menu

Global signal handlers and state

Global handlers were setup to keep track of:

Cross-scene signals
Game state (hp, points, orders) We were able to use these to create a TV scene that kept track of HP and points

Day 3

New overworld with shooting and item collection
New artist joins and helps
Line system

New Overworld

Reimu can shoot now, and you can collect items

We adapted all the bullet patterns we wanted, except for one attack that involved reimu throwing a ying-yang ball. That one takes time...

New art

Our 4th member helped to create some nice art for the story of our game

Final Day

Storyboarding
Title page, game over page, end page
Submission

Final Assets

I tried to make a logo, and failed

Storyboarding

We pieced together the entire story. Im not going to upload it here, play the game, its sweet.

Submission

We did some final tweaks and bug fixes, and published 7 minutes before the jam ended. It was stressful haha. This is the picture of the final game we submitted:

Cool Stuff

There was another cirno game, it is about creating perfect ice blocks ( https://itch.io/jam/touhou-jam-16/rate/3991138)

Directory

Touhou Jam 6