Hi! It’s been the better part of 3 years since our last blog post – hope you’ve all been getting by. Unfortunately, I don’t have the happiest of news to deliver here, but let’s get it out of the way:

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1) Our website here experienced a security breach recently. I first noticed signs of it around the start of 2023 when the next-post button was linking to a c*sino site. I deleted the offending posts and user(s) related to that, but at the time I was too occupied to take a closer look at the server to find anything else amiss.

Thanks to Raineh Daze in the last post’s comments for pointing out the spam link was appearing again, as well as some strange elements blocking the blog’s header links. This time I finally took a closer look, and found some added and changed PHP files on the server which were really shady – featuring obfuscated code, eval(), permission changes, file upload interfaces, and so on. Fortunately we have file history tracking which allowed me to identify which changes were new. So I went to work cleaning up:

• Reverted the bad PHP file changes/additions. This fixed the header links.
• Deleted offending posts/users from the blog again.
• Updated all our software. I’m going to make sure I don’t slack on this as much, since neglecting this for a long time probably led to the breach. Recent WordPress versions have options for auto-updating, so that may help.
• Since a database-level breach may have happened, I cleared everyone’s account passwords on the blog (WordPress) and the forum (MyBB).

Here are the most important things to know for you all:

• If you have an account on the blog or forum, the passwords you previously used may have been compromised. If you had used the same passwords on any other site, you should change your passwords on those sites as soon as possible. (In general, it’s not recommended to share passwords between different sites, and one reason is that things like this can happen.)
• Since the old passwords may have been compromised, I made sure they no longer work by clearing everyone’s password fields on the blog and forum. This means you need to reset the password by email in order to log in again. On the blog for example, go to the login page, click ‘Lost your password?’, then enter your username or email to initiate a password reset. You don’t have to do this immediately, but just remember you’ll have to do this next time you log in.

We might look into a simpler dev-blog setup in the near future so that it’s not as much for us to maintain and keep secure. But for the time being, hopefully we’ve shaken off the bad stuff in our current setup. Do let us know if you see anything suspicious again.

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2) We’ve still been occupied enough elsewhere that we haven’t had notable ESR progress since the last post. We’re still in touch through our team chat, but everyone’s been busy and/or have had other things to worry about.

For my part, I occasionally get an interesting ESR idea in my head and jot it down for later, but that’s been about it. As I mentioned in comments, I’ve had personal goings-on, including moving house earlier this year. I feel like I still have a backlog before getting back to ESR for real, but the fact that I’ve just been able to clean up the website and make a new post is a good sign that I’m catching up.

Aside from free time, there are ways that I now feel better-equipped to work on ESR’s writing than before – in a different vein from what LT talked about in the last post. It’s a nice bit of motivation for me to carve out the opportunity to get back on ESR, and I’ll likely talk about it in the future when that time comes.

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In other news, Twitter’s been experiencing a meltdown of sorts (which somehow seems fast and too slow at the same time). Chances are we’ll be posting on another social in addition to Twitter when we’re more active again. Not sure where yet, but Tumblr seems like a decent option? I’ve been on the lookout for Touhou/gamedev Mastodon servers too, and guess we’ll see what other options pop up later.

Finally, I’m pretty excited for the return of the versus format in Touhou 19! And looks like some less popular characters are going to get the chance to shine. I’ve got a backlog of Touhou to play myself, but it’s still comforting to see the series continue to advance. Let’s do our best to catch up and grab our chance to shine, too!

Hi again, and hope you’re all doing okay out there – 2020 as a whole has been some year. Probably best not to dwell on it too much here and jump into the ESR news instead. It’s better news, I promise!

Here’s the progress since May:

• Pass 1, main writing: 83% (+0)
• Pass 2, scripting: 74% (+2)
• Pass 3, effects: 38% (+0)
• Pass 4, minor writing: 36% (+6)

Okay, so if you’ve been following the Twitter updates, you’ll see that the numbers haven’t gone up in the last 5-6 weeks. That’s the not-as-good news. I’ve been doing some reviewing and cleanup of previously written days, mainly concerning Koishi advice, but generally these weeks have been a bit more busy for me.

The good news is that LTalon, one of our main writers, is back! After some discussions, we’ve recovered some important plans that we had for the endings, and pieced together a few new ideas as well. We’ve also drawn up a more complete picture of how all the stats and affection levels will be used throughout the game.

So in terms of outlining and planning, there won’t be as much reinventing of wheels as I had previously feared, and this definitely boosts our chances of putting together a complete game eventually. I’ll leave it to LT to talk more about the writing (and his plans in general) in a follow-up post.

It’s not just LT putting the ‘Dan’ in Dai-Sukima Dan this update. Sigma (now usually known as Mars) is still familiar with Ren’Py and found a few free weekends for ESR, so he worked on some story scripting and coding cleanups. Like the rest of us, he may not have a ton of free time to spend on the game generally – but having someone else who’s comfortable with the scripting/coding gives us more options on splitting up that part of the work.

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On another note, we got a message on the forum about some broken music-download links in old blog posts. This reminded us that the old forum had a public downloads section for ESR music, and we hadn’t made a replacement for that after migrating our site in 2018. So we’ve set up a new music downloads page here.

You may have heard about a certain other game series turning 35 years old, but over here we’re celebrating Touhou’s 25th anniversary! Here’s to many more years of dazzling danmaku games.

With that, it’s screenshot time:

Hope all of you are finding a way to stay safe during this pandemic. Programmers like me have it easy, but if you’re working in something like retail, or especially in the medical field, you have my full respect for dealing with whatever you’re going through now.

If there’s anything positive to come from this, it might be that there’s a bigger focus on distributing goods online now, which is generally good news for Western Touhou fans. For example, Touhou 10-12 are going to be released on Steam soon, marking the first worldwide releases among Touhou games that ESR is based on.

Moving onto ESR talk, here’s the progress since January:

• Pass 1, main writing: 83% (+0)
• Pass 2, scripting: 72% (+2)
• Pass 3, effects: 38% (+0)
• Pass 4, minor writing: 30% (+3)

Last time, I said I wanted to take a serious look at working on Pass 4 myself, so I did. Overall, I’d say results have been positive: I made some real progress (5 scenes’ worth), and the minor writing tasks feel pretty doable so far. If I can keep that up, then it really boosts the chances of eventually completing ESR, since this can significantly ease the workload on our main writers who are more busy.

Even though I’m just writing side segments (Koishi advice, stat boosting, and story path variations), it’s slower going compared to scripting. But I think that’s natural – first, I’m a programmer by trade, and I figure I need some time to get the hang of creative writing. Second, those side segments honestly take up a good portion of the game’s word count. When you play through it, it doesn’t feel that long since you only take one branch out of many. But when you do a repeat playthrough, those branches really help to keep things fresh.

Provided that they’re well-written, of course. We all have our strengths and weaknesses in different aspects of writing. Some areas to consider:

• Coherence. Does this Koishi advice segment match the details of the upcoming scene Koishi is talking about? Does it consider previous advice segments and previous related scenes? Does the timeframe of events throughout the day more or less make sense? If there’s a scene that doesn’t always happen, do we account for that later by branching the dialogue accordingly?
• World immersion. Are Marisa’s words and reactions consistent with her character through the rest of the game? Do we have our basic Touhou facts straight? Are we making enough use of those facts, or does the writing feel too generic? Are any characters or settings appearing too often or not enough?
• Writing quality. Are any word choices, sentence structures, or dialogue patterns getting stale? Do the sentences flow? Do the event transitions and dialogue progression seem natural or forced? Is the overall mood what we want it to be? Are the jokes, references, etc. clever and varied?

I’m best at the ‘Coherence’ area because I also need to get my story straight when doing technical writing. The other areas need more experience and creativity to do well, so I’m trying to work on that. I start off by writing something that kind of works, and then I’m generally making many rounds of edits (or rewrites) to the same scene – hours later, days later, weeks later. Hopefully that’s a sign of improvement!

Later, as time allows, the main writers can look over what I did and make more edits. I hope they can, since as I re-read what they wrote up to Demo 3.0, I have to admire much of the variety, wording, and references they came up with. But my goal is to make that edit job significantly easier than writing every segment from scratch. So I’m going to continue plugging away at the minor writing tasks, hopefully bettering my skills in the process.

Don’t forget to participate in the Touhou popularity poll! It opens June 7th in Japan time. Screenshots to cap things off:

Happy Nazrin year! I know better than to say ‘here’s to another decade of ESR’, but we’ll surely have plenty to work on to fill up this year at least, so here’s to a productive 2020.

Here’s the updated progress scorecard after another 4 months:

• Pass 1, main writing: 83% (+0)
• Pass 2, scripting: 70% (+8)
• Pass 3, effects: 38% (+0)
• Pass 4, minor writing: 27% (+0)

In terms of what I’ve been working on, I’ve been sticking with the status quo, as you can see. But the scripting is definitely on track to catch up with the main writing this year, and once that happens, it will be trickier to make progress. So it’s time to talk about Passes 1, 3, and 4 a bit, and to think more seriously about who needs to do which part.

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Pass 3 – Additional visual and sound effects, mostly for battles

I’m not particularly worried about this. Graph is still around to discuss ESR matters, so it’s just a matter of when it gets worked on. Also, I’ve worked with Graph on Touhou Mecha and basically know what goes into the animation code. So even if Graph doesn’t get around to it, I can also work on this part. (It would turn out better if he does it, though, because he can create new image assets for new kinds of danmaku and stuff.)

Pass 4 – Other writing: Koishi advice, stat boosting, and slight dialogue variations depending on story path

Ideally, our more experienced writers would be the ones to write these parts. But realistically, even if they came back tomorrow to resume ESR work, they would have a disproportionately big workload on their hands if they had to finish both Pass 1 and Pass 4.

A second option is to recruit new team members into DSD to help here. However, we’d need an experienced writer with a lot of availability to guide any new writers in the right direction. ESR is quite far into development, after all, and keeping cohesion with the existing script is important. Maybe this option could open up later, but it doesn’t seem like the best idea at the moment.

A third option is for Graph and/or me to give Pass 4 a shot. We have discussed the game with the writers for several years, and we’ve read the script they’ve written several times over, so we should be able to leverage that experience to write something that fits into ESR. It’s just a matter of whether our writing skills are up to the task.

Graph, of course, does have Touhou Mecha on his portfolio. I’m the one who has more to prove in this department. Since I’m almost caught up with Pass 2, though, I do have time and momentum on my side. So I’m planning to give Pass 4 a serious look soon, and see how I fare.

Pass 1 – Main scene planning and writing

As any writer knows, a lot of little things have to come together to form a cohesive and satisfying ending. Iced and LT have left some plans on the remaining 17% of the scenes, but the plans are brief and at times noticeably outdated. Chances are, after all the years of working on ESR, they have thought up a lot more detail for these scenes compared to what the plans reflect.

So it would be strongly preferred if they came back to work on this part, at least to plan things out in more detail. Graph and I could try filling in the gaps ourselves as a last resort, but we would likely be reinventing several wheels in the process.

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No matter how we look at it, we’ve got some work to do. Perhaps enough that another demo release seems like a good idea. It would be nice to get feedback on how our work is coming along, and to give you something new to play after all this time. Demo 3.0 does get fairly far, and maybe going much further is unusual for a visual novel demo – but the full game is planned to be free anyhow, so I don’t see the harm.

It wouldn’t be a good idea to use half-completed scenes in the demo, though. So for any new scenes we include, we’ll want Passes 3 and 4 to get up to speed first. Demo 3.0 goes up to 27% (in terms of unique content, including all paths). I think a good goal for Demo 4.0 would be 45%. Anything before that kind of leaves you hanging without much closure, and anything after that is getting too close to the final pathbreaks.

So we’ll see when we can get Passes 3 and 4 up to 45%. We should still set our priorities in a way that gives us the highest chance of finishing the entire game, so no guarantees on when this goal will be met. But once we do, we can think more about Demo 4.0.

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Wrapping up with the usual screenshots:

We’ve just passed the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. Unfortunately, Eastern Starlight Romance doesn’t feature the Aki sisters, nor does the game take place in autumn… Graph did contribute to that Aki sisters anthology quite a while back, though. That’s something, right?

Here’s how ESR has progressed since the last update:

• I’ve stayed at pretty much the same pace with the scripting. I’m also still doing a little bit of code cleanup, though I slowed down slightly compared to last time.
• Graph came out of inactivity and tracked down quite a few royalty-free SFX for use in ESR. As I was scripting new scenes, I had left ‘TODO’ comments in the script to mark SFX we wanted but didn’t have yet. We built up quite a few of these comments over time, and I also added a few more comments for ideas to spice up earlier scenes (before UFO). Graph managed to address almost all of the existing comments, and at the end of it, our SFX asset count had nearly doubled!

Here’s the updated progress scorecard. Note that for simplicity, passes 3 and 4 only count completed scenes as progress. So for example, ‘effects’ will only be updated when a scene has been addressed on both the visuals and sound departments. Thanks to the new wave of SFX, though, the pass 3 score should go up more quickly later.

• Pass 1, main writing: 83% (+0)
• Pass 2, scripting: 62% (+7)
• Pass 3, effects: 38% (+0, but many scenes only need visual effects now)
• Pass 4, minor writing: 27% (+0)

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A few comments on our previous post got us thinking about plans for ESR once the game is finished, so I’d like to highlight those here. I should note that I’m answering somewhat conservatively because (1) our main writers still aren’t available to discuss these things, and (2) we’ve still got quite a ways to go until the game is finished. Nevertheless, I think there’s an appropriate level of forward thinking that we can start now.

Q1: Possibility of a Steam release?

A1: This definitely should be a possibility, since ZUN is okay with Touhou fangames on Steam these days, and Steam Direct replaced the stricter Greenlight process. Ren’Py has support for Steam achievements as well. Personally, I think it seems worth a shot – might as well go for more publicity if we’re putting all this time into ESR. Regardless of whether Steam works out for us, though, we should still do a self-hosted release of ESR, similar to our demos.

Q2: Thoughts on translations?

A2: I’m not sure if we’ll have the time to support ‘official’ translations built into ESR – I don’t think it’d be too complex on the technical side, but coordinating with translators for a 500,000-word game would take a lot of work. Not just on the translators’ part, but on our part as well, to ensure that the translation is good quality and mostly matches the intentions of the original script.

For what it’s worth, if we do want to support an official translation, I believe Japanese could be the most likely language candidate since multiple members on our core team can read Japanese to some degree. That means we would be able to look over a Japanese translation ourselves, and more-or-less confirm that it’s on the right track. Again, it’d be a big commitment, so we’ll see when we are done with the base game. Then we can gauge the game’s popularity, gauge our motivation and free time, and so on.

On the other hand, I see no issues with giving shoutouts to unofficial patch translations – with the understanding that we make no guarantees of quality. We actually do have one project to shout-out right now: SFY and their friend have been working on a Chinese patch of the ESR demo. If you’re interested in this translation patch, let SFY know in the comments!

Q3: Possibility of distributions at conventions like Comiket?

A3: I personally think this would be really neat, though I’d certainly want to see the reception of the finished game to determine whether it’s worth it. Traveling to a convention and setting up a booth is obviously a sizable commitment. Though that could be alleviated if, for example, we were already traveling to Japan for other reasons (Graph and I have visited Japan twice before, for what that’s worth).

A convention in the US might also be a decent idea, so that it’d be easier for us to actually converse with interested visitors. TouhouCon no longer exists though, so I guess it’d have to be something like Anime Expo if we went the stateside route.

Although this is something I want to confirm with the writers, I’m pretty sure we’d have trouble setting a price on ESR – since we’ve had such a scattered team in our early years, and I believe we’ve always had this understanding that the game wasn’t for profit. As such, traveling to a lot of conventions isn’t likely to be practical for us, in terms of the money and effort involved. But doing it once for the experience does seem like a nice idea.

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That went longer than expected, but I guess that’s not a bad thing. Anyway, if you’ve got any more questions on things, feel free to ask. Let’s finish with some screenshots:

When we released ESR’s first demo, the latest installment in the official Touhou series was 12.8, Fairy Wars. A couple of weeks ago, Touhou 17’s demo was released at Reitaisai. Nice to see Touhou still going strong after all this time!

Let’s start with the ESR dev progress since January 15. I’m still the only one doing stuff at the moment, so it’s not all that exciting – but after all the inactivity previously, it personally feels good to report something non-zero.

On the other hand, since I’m getting close to scripting the final pathlocks, I noticed I made a couple of mistakes with counting the scenes around this crucial part of the game. I also noticed a couple of unfinished scenes that I mistakenly counted as finished (in terms of main writing). So the writers’ score goes down a little bit, but not too much.

• Pass 1, main writing: 83% (-2)
• Pass 2, scripting: 55% (+7)
• Pass 3, effects: 38% (+0)
• Pass 4, minor writing: 27% (+0)

I’ve also done a proportionate amount of general programming work. Mainly code cleanups which should make it slightly easier to read, search, and edit the existing script, as well as write the rest of the script. Stuff like how we code battle SFX timing, character position transforms, and Marisa face changes. Our Ren’Py script recently passed 300,000 words of dialogue (according to the Ren’Py Lint tool), so it had better be straightforward to work with! I still have more cleanups in mind, but it won’t be too long until I look at material changes instead – like a CG gallery, more settings, and some UI ideas. I’ll be sure to post about them here when the time comes.

Overall, I believe I’ve averaged like 8-10 hours a week on ESR for the past 4 months, without taking a break of more than 2 weeks. That’s exactly where I want to be right now: sustain the pace, don’t burn out, and have energy left over for some communication/updates. It’s pretty hard to say when ESR will be finished at this rate, especially with no writing or effects progress recently. But if we do a VERY rough extrapolation from my scripting progress alone, we’re looking at (100-55)/(7/4) = 26 months from now, meaning mid-2021. Make of that what you will. At any rate, we’ll certainly be at this for a while, which is why I’m putting all this emphasis on sustainable pace.

Speaking of updates, as long as I’m doing them, I was thinking of making these blog posts about every 4 months. Additionally, I’m making mini-updates on the DSD Twitter every 1 to 1.5 months, so that’s something to watch for if you’d like more frequent updates.

Finally, why don’t we have a few screenshots:

Hey all, let’s try this again. I had been thinking of giving an update on ESR, but barring handing out story spoilers, I wasn’t sure what else to say besides “it’s coming along”, which feels pretty lame to keep saying over the course of years.

So I think it’s worth at least spoiling one thing: how much content is planned for the game (counting all story paths), how far we’ve come, and how much is left. By putting up some actual numbers, we can give you all a real sense of progress, and also encourage ourselves to keep a steady pace and make those numbers go up.

Here’s how we work. In general, we need to take a few passes through the story to complete it:

1. Main scene planning and writing
2. Scripting the scenes in Ren’Py
3. Additional visual and sound effects, mostly for battles
4. Other writing: Koishi advice, stat boosting, and slight dialogue variations depending on story path

For the most part, the writers do passes 1 and 4, I’m the one doing pass 2, and Graph does pass 3.

Pass 1 takes the most work, naturally, but it’s also quite far along at this point. Pass 2 takes several hours per scene, including cut-in management, minimal visual/sound effects, and some writing checks/proofreading. Passes 3 and 4 depend on the scene and how ambitious we get. On some scenes, the writers do 1 and most of 4 together. 1, 2, and 3 have to be done in order though.

Our latest demo, Demo 3.0, has 27% of the planned game scenes. By my count, here’s how we’re doing:

• Pass 1, main writing: 85%
• Pass 2, scripting: 48%
• Pass 3, effects: 38%
• Pass 4, other writing: 27% (with haphazard completion afterward)

And there’s other tasks which we could count separately – character cut-ins, CGs, music and general programming (menus and GUI, image definitions, audio playing, etc.):

• Cut-ins: Nothing major missing, and I wager our expression ranges are already above average for VNs. So this is basically done. If we think of any other cut-ins that could be particularly useful, we’d ask Graph and he’ll decide if he’s up for it.
• CG art: About 78%, varying a bit depending on how the rest of the writing pans out.
• Music: I believe this has been good to go for a while, with a couple of pieces ready which haven’t appeared up to Demo 3.
• General programming: Things still basically work. But since we have such large volumes of scripting code, I’m still trying to tweak things to make the script easier to write and edit down the road. Incorporating some of the newer Ren’Py features helps with this as well. So I’m doing some of that in between working on pass 2. When I’m caught up with pass 2, I’d like to look into making some extras like a CG gallery menu.

For my part, in terms of making the numbers go up, I’m aiming to do a few hours of Ren’Py scripting each week in the long term. What typically happened in the past is that I’d grab several scenes at once, and try to script them all in a short time. Then I felt burned out for a little while, and needed more effort to come back. Even if the work is ‘supposed to be fun’, I feel like I have to mix up my week with different types of work to stay productive. So, I’m going to start applying this principle to ESR and hopefully it helps out.

Finally, we always have some material for screenshots, so let’s have a couple of those:

Long time no see, folks. As you might know, I was doing most of the work on DSD’s side project, Touhou Mecha.

I’m going to make it official: At this point, it’s unlikely that Touhou Mecha VN will continue. All of us have been busy so we’ve got our hands full trying to finish Eastern Starlight Romance, of course. But more than that, my interest in the mecha genre isn’t what it used to be.

The two TM episodes that I finished will be available for download for the foreseeable future. My thanks go out to OverCoat, who worked on the music, and the rest of the DSD team for making it possible to get to that point.

Anyway, I’ll be seeing ESR through to the end, then I can think about what I can do for future projects.

Hi, we’re back! Our new domain is https://daisukimadan.net and the old Faceroll site will redirect to this one for a while, so that everyone can find the new site.

It took some doing, largely because we decided we should change our forum software (from a not-free one to a free one) and moved our image galleries from our forum to our blog in the process. Here are the new galleries: ESR and TM. I wrote a few scripts to port over as many of the image and forum-thread links as I reasonably could. Our main job here isn’t web development, obviously, but do let us know if you spot any prominent broken links remaining (like on recent posts or game-info pages), or if any site functions seem especially wonky.

Barring major issues there, we should finally be ready to resume work on Eastern Starlight Romance, which we definitely still want to see to completion. Compared to a few years back, our recently-reporting dev team isn’t as filled out as before, but we still at least have Iced on writing, Graph on art, and me on coding. I don’t think we have immediate plans for further recruitment, but if we do decide on that then we’ll be sure to post about it here.

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who’s commented on the forum or blog posts even during our long inactivity. We’d be crazy to keep working on ESR after so many years if people weren’t interested. Thanks to your support, we’re still here and determined to finish, and we know we’re only slightly crazy!