Thank you for downloading Eastern Starlight Romance demo 2.0. We've changed quite a bit, hopefully for the better, and we're looking forward to hearing what you think. This demo contains up to "stage 3" of our VN, so there's still a lot of content to go writing wise, but we've gotten most of the internals in shape. We might add a sound effect, change a pose slightly, or add another music track in a few places, but in general this is similar to what we're hoping the finished product will look like.
Given the amount of changes we've done, we hope that people who went through our demo before will start up a new game. But we talked with the Ren'py designer to make sure all the old saves should still work (mostly). If you're a new player, we hope you enjoy the full experience from the beginning.
Project status updates can be found on our Blog.
About Game Flow / Heroines
Marisa's quest for immortality demands that she keeps her resources and options open for some time. In particular, Alice, Reimu and Patchouli provide means and philosophy related to this storyline. Because of this, the story won't completely focus on one heroine until the immortality problem is resolved, which is planned to be around 2/3rds of the way into the full game. However soon (very soon after the Demo 2.0s end) Marisa will choose which romantic path(s) she's interested in, which will alter the way Marisa interacts with the heroines.
Flandre is an exception, since her story arc turns away from the immortality angle for reasons that become apparent in the demo. You may choose to opt out of this arc as early as Demo 2.0, though if you do you may find some days on the calendar are skipped(This just means those were Flandre-centric days).
About Dates
This game uses the Japanese Lunar Calendar, which makes the numbering of the days a little different. Each month alternates between 29 and 30 days, with a "leap month" occurring to keep the months properly aligned.
Changes:
- Demo now goes up to the second festival.
- Marisa portrait added.
- All artwork reshaded, most artwork redone.
- Music looping reworked. Added several new tracks.
- Music Room added.
- VFX added for danmaku scenes.
- Title screen altered.
- Options menu edited.
- Several script segments edited for clarity and brevity.
- Koishi advice edited to be more useful.
[edit] Basic Help
- To advance through the game, left-click or press the space or enter keys.
- When at a menu, left-click to make a choice, or use the arrow keys to select a choice and enter to activate it.
- If Annotations are turned on in Settings, then some words (mainly terms from Japanese culture or the Touhou universe) in the dialogue will be underlined. Click on the underlined word(s) to see a definition or explanation.
-
Dialogue window icons:
- Book icon
- Does a Quick Save of the game. A quick-saved game can be loaded with a Quick Load (available from the Main Menu or the Game Menu). Only one quick-saved game may exist at a time.
- X icon
- Hides the text window.
- Plus icon
- Opens the readback window, which shows up to 100 lines of previously-seen game text.
[edit] Game Menu
When playing a game, right-click or press the escape key to enter the game menu.
At the upper-right, you can see the current day.
The lower-left box is the Stats box. Depending on the choices you make, certain stats will go up more quickly than others. Stats can affect your available options later in the game.
The upper-left menu gives the following choices:
- Return
- Returns to the game.
- Save History
-
Goes to the save screen, where you can save a game by clicking on a save slot.
You can also hover the mouse over a save slot and press Del to delete that file (you will be asked whether you're sure you want to delete it).
- Load History
- Goes to the load screen, where you can load a game by clicking on a save slot. The most recently saved file is highlighted in blue.
- QuickLoad
- Loads a quick-saved game. This choice is not available if quick save has never been used before.
- Settings
- Change the game settings (options/configuration). In the Settings screen, hover the mouse over a button to learn about what it does.
- Main Menu
- Returns to the main menu, ending the current game.
- Quit
- Exits the game; the game will be closed and ended.
[edit] Known Bugs
There are two bugs associated with transitions (such as a battle effect, or a character slowly appearing or disappearing).
- If you enter the game menu screen (by right-clicking or pressing Esc) in the middle of a transition, then if you return from the game menu screen, the game will be "stuck" at the end of that transition.
- To fix this, try pressing the H key twice. This will get the transition unstuck and allow you to resume play.
- If you minimize the game window in the middle of a transition, then one of the following may occur:
- When the game is un-minimized, the game screen may disappear or become completely black. To fix this, try resizing the game window or pressing F to toggle fullscreen on/off, and the game screen should come back (allowing you to resume play).
- The game may crash soon after it is minimized. If a sound glitch occurs, then the game might have to be forcibly closed (for example, in Windows, go to the Task Manager and end the "Eastern Starlight Romance (Demo 2.0).exe" process).
We'll do what we can to ensure these bugs are fixed in future releases.
[edit] Key and Mouse Bindings
- Left-click, Enter
- Advances through the game, and activates menu choices, buttons, and bars.
- Space
- Advances through the game, but does not activate choices.
- Arrow Keys
- Selects menu choices, buttons, and bars.
- Ctrl
- Causes skipping to occur while the ctrl key is held down.
- Tab
- Toggles skipping, causing it to occur until tab is pressed again.
- > (Shift + . on many keyboards)
- Skips straight to the next choice, completely bypassing dialogue in between.
- Mousewheel-Up, PageUp
- Opens the readback window, which shows up to 100 lines of previously-seen game text.
- Right-click, Escape
- Enters the game menu. When in the game menu, returns to the game.
- Middle-click, H
- Hides the text window and other transient displays.
- F
- Toggles fullscreen mode.
- S
- Takes a screenshot, saving it in a file named screenshotxxxx.png, where xxxx is a serial number.
- Alt-F4, Command-Q
- Quits the game.
- Delete
- In the Save or Load screens, deletes a highlighted save slot.
[edit] Credits
- Story
- Theodore Suzukawa (Iced Fairy) - writing, general script design
- Clemon Yueh (LTalon) - writing, path design
- WereRat42 - writing, path design
- Verloren - storyline assistance
- Graphics
- Daniel Chan (Graph) - Character cut-ins, event CGs, backgrounds, and GUI design
- Headless Fairy, WereRat42, BananaMae, ChuuChuu - Sketches and references
- Programming
- Stephen Chan (SleepKirby) - general programming, GUI programming, scripting
- Sigma - general programming, scripting
- Iced Fairy, LTalon, Graph - scripting
- Sound
- Mixtape - background music, sound effects
- Stratowolf - background music
- Vanikoro, Iced Fairy, LTalon, Sigma - sound effects
- Testing and Feedback
- Everyone above
- Demo 1a beta testers: Minunlike, Tsilini, and Suikama
- Demo 2 beta testers: Cuddlefish, 28JFJ, Natsuki, Lloyd, Boke, Kura-X, Cosicant
- Special Thanks
- ZUN for giving us a wonderful playground to work in.
- Sigma - developer site maintenance, Subversion server maintenance
- The Ren'Py team - the Ren'Py game engine ( Ren'Py home page ). Demo 2.0 uses Ren'Py 6.12.0.
- The Ren'Py community - technical support
[edit] Legal Notice
Ren'Py uses source code from a number of open source projects. For a list, and a location where the source code can be downloaded from, please view the LICENSE.txt file in the renpy directory, or visit http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/License .
All Touhou characters and setting are copyright ZUN. All original work is copyright Dai Sukima Dan.