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:
Non-zero progress? Beating out the average rom-com hahaha.
Seriously though I’m glad things are moving forward I’m more than happy to wait for this!
Nice, I’m so happy to see any kind of update.
Yay, progress!!
I’m really happy to this <3
Yeah, any sort of progress or progress update is great. It beats out wondering if you’re still around or the site going down again.
So, I was wondering, but in the demo (3), does the stats actually affect anything? Like, if you increase them. Anyway, I’ve known this since about a bit after demo 3 came out, so I’m looking forward to future development and wait with anticipation.
@Anonymous Inc: Yeah, the stats do affect some scenes. For example, some danmaku battles’ results are affected by your danmaku stat, and some choice menus have a certain choice available only if your knowledge stat is high enough.
We don’t have many stat checks in the early game though. They actually start to pick up around the end of Demo 3.
Good to know.
Hope you’re having a nice summer.
@Raineh Daze: Hey, same to you. Yeah, doing pretty well and still plugging away at ESR as planned. It’s nice that Graph is back at it too.
Still watching and waiting.
How many years has it been?
With all the fan games being released on Steam, do you think it would be possible to get this on there as well?
@Back: We’re closing in on 10 years since our first blog post back in 2009. Sure has been a while…
It’s definitely exciting that ZUN gave the go-ahead for fangames on Steam, and it also helps that Steam Direct replaced Greenlight. Renpy 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. If Steam doesn’t work out for whatever reason, though, we’ll still do a self-distributed release of ESR, similar to our demos.
Being able to get it on Steam WOULD be pretty cool.
Me and a friend of mine made a Chinese patch of the demo. We haven’t released it, of course, and it’s still a WiP, but we’d like to know what you guys think.
https://i.imgur.com/by5fKQg.jpg
@SFY: Oh, that’s really cool – I don’t think any of us expected ESR to get fan-made creations like this!
I’m not sure if we’ll have the time to support ‘official’ translations built into ESR, but we can definitely give shoutouts to patch translation projects like yours. We’ll make another blog post this month (September), so we can give you guys a shoutout then, to see who else is interested in the translation.
I know we’re looking faaaar into the future but would you guys be interested in a Japanese version, maybe eventually a download edition for sale (100yen is the minimum, more about the exposure than sales) at Comiket in the far, far future? I think the Touhou doujin community in Japan will continue to recline warmly, but I think they would be most delighted by ESR. Might be something for all the writers and devs on the team to look forward to!
@Ark: That’s definitely looking far ahead! But it’s certainly an idea to think about. For what it’s worth, if we do decide to look into supporting an official translation, I believe Japanese would be the most likely language candidate since multiple members on our core team can read Japanese to some degree. That doesn’t mean we could write a good Japanese translation ourselves, but it means we’d stand a chance of looking over a translation and confirming that it’s on the right track.
I’ve actually visited one Touhou convention in Nagoya before, and yeah, it would be super neat if we could set up a convention booth for DSD someday! We’d have to be careful about pricing for 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. But if the price purely covered the cost of setting up the DSD booth and making any distributable materials, without a profit margin, maybe that could work. Worth looking into, at any rate.