Touhou Rain
Faustina Bartsch
Eleven months ago on a long train ride home, I wrote the first lines of code for a small platforming game. Little did I know that this prototype was the start of something much more than a just game -- it was a dream that would become shared within an amazing team, and it was the greatest step in a personal journey that had begun over eight years ago.
Today, our game RAIN Project has been released on the Steam marketplace! Gameplay videos and screenshots are all over our Steam page, but in this post, I'll be telling the story of RAIN's development -- where it all started, and how the game came to be.
If you look at the PC games market today, it's all about the big names. You've got your League of Legends, Civilization, Overwatch. But back in 2010, it was a simpler time. And if you could get your hands on a computer, the first thing you did was load up the flash game websites.
But the best places were the user created sections. That's where I was. See, back then there was no such thing as content regulation or quality control. Anything that you could build, you could share. And in this wild west of flash games was where I released my "masterpieces".
Looking back now, I wasn't exactly producing professional quality work. But for the little me, this was my pride and joy. Of course the critics descended, but I was just sitting there with a stupid grin, thinking "people out there are actually playing my games!"
It was around this time that I first heard about Touhou Project -- a series of bullet-hell games made by single-man developer ZUN. I was awestruck. From the beautiful bullet patterns to lightning-fast boss fights, these were exactly the kind of games I was trying to make.
So I was having a grand time in the world of flash games. I had my own little corner of the internet to share what I had created, and I even made a bit of pocket money from advertisements. But one weekend, I woke up to a sinking message.
Banned. Not for releasing too many crappy games, which would be fair. I was banned for being underage. See, legally a person must be 13 years of age to hold a Kongregate account. And in strict violation of this ever-important rule, 11-year-old me had his flash games career come to a sudden end.
Well, seven years have passed since then. I'm older and more experienced now, and some mistaken people might even say I've matured. But that desire to built the Touhou-style bullet-hell game of my dreams still hasn't gone away.
People often ask me, "why spend so much time on games? You could be doing so much else with your time". And while it's definitely true that I waste a lot of time on dumb things, I don't think that building games is one of them. Game development has led me on some amazing adventures, and it's even what got me interested in artificial intelligence in the first place.
While devastating at the time, getting booted off of Kongregate could have been a blessing in disguise. All this time I had been using Multimedia Fusion 2, a drag-and-drop game engine, to build my stuff. Finally, I had a chance to move on to more flexible tools -- and with that, bigger ambitions!
In 2013, I learned the basics of iOS development in the cramped garage of a startup to build Blue, a bullet-hell with a minimalistic twist. I learned one crucial thing that summer -- while building games might be easy, building good games was a lot of work! After three months, all I had accomplished was four minute-long levels.
For a while afterwards, I drifted on-and-off between a bunch of different projects, never quite concluding them. Without a clear target, I decided I had to buckle down and bring a game from start to finish. 2015 marked the birth of Skyflower, a procedurally generated bullet-hell dungeon crawler, that eventually made it onto Steam! At the time, I thought this was the height of accomplishment -- but looking back, everything from programming to artwork was in severe need of improvement. Skyflower didn't do so well on the market. But that experience of putting my all into something and failing to reach satisfaction would light a fire in my heart, that just wouldn't seem to go away. I had to try again.
After the release of Skyflower, I needed a break from big game projects. Instead, 2016 became the year of game engines. Unlimited Bullet Festival, a scripting language for bullets, made it easy to throw together intricate bullet patterns in only a few lines of code. But I wanted to build an entire engine of my own -- and that eventually came true with the Touhou web engine, a fully moddable and scriptable template for writing web-browser bullet-hell games in Javascript.
With the engine, I was able recreate three bosses from Touhou 8: Imperishable Night! Unfortunately, with school and obligations piling up, I just couldn't find time to finish a full-fledged game with it.
If it's not clear by now, this dream to build my perfect bullet-hell is a goal I've been chasing for a long time. Sure, things haven't always proceeded smoothly -- eight years and over fifty prototypes later, I'm still not satisfied with the results -- but the next step was always calling. I wanted to build the game of my dreams. So all I had to do was go out there and build it.
And in summer 2017, the stars aligned. I had enough experience about game development and bullet-hells to bring a game from start to finish. My friends were on summer break, and with some convincing they were willing to help out. ZUN even put out a message stating that Touhou fangames could be published on Steam! At long last, the beginnings of RAIN Project began to form.
Today, I'm looking back with a smile. On July 3rd, 2018, RAIN Project released on Steam. It's not the perfect game. And I'm definitely nowhere close to the perfect developer or leader. But what I can say with conviction is that I grabbed this chance and ran as far as I could. And what's left is a game that I can proudly call my own -- a bullet-hell adventure of my dreams.
Really, RAIN Project was a game that shouldn't have been able to exist. We're a development team of high schoolers, most of us with very little experience at all. Plus, this was during college applications season, so even finding the time to put in work was a challenge. We picked a pixel-art style, when none of us could draw in pixel art. For some fanatical reason, our ragtag group of friends was aiming to take on everything that releasing a game entailed ourselves -- from programming and design, to art and music, and even marketing.
But in the words of Sanae Kochiya, "You can't let yourself be held back by common sense". Through what can only be some sort of miracle, we're here today. RAIN isn't the perfect game, but it's a game we proudly raised from naive ideas and daydreaming to publication. We messed up, a lot, but with every mistake was a lesson to be learned. To be fair, I'll admit I'm probably dramatizing things quite a bit. But now, looking back at it all, I'm going to attempt to detail the experience as a whole -- what worked, what didn't, and what could use just a bit a lot more work in the future.
If you asked me a year ago to describe what RAIN project would be like, it would be a whole different scene. RAIN's core engine was originally for a fighting game I was prototyping. The level maps were originally designed as an open-world RPG adventure. Even the storyline has shifted dramatically, as it steadily molded around Sanae's journey up the god's mountain.
For me, design is one of the hardest aspects of game development -- because it forces you to be a realist, when you really want to be a dreamer. In an ideal world, all my games would have pixel-perfect animations, branching dialogues and cutscenes, and enough content to last through the apocalypse. Of course, in practice, none of this will ever happen. The number one goal of every game developer is deceptively simple -- make a game, and make it fun. And in a world where it's easy to get lost chasing fancy features and shiny new ideas, keeping this vision in mind is crucially important.
For RAIN, that meant painfully saying no to a bunch of otherwise great suggestions from the team, simply because we didn't have enough time or resources to implement them. Some levels, like the Moriya Shrine grounds or the Momiji miniboss fight, had to be scrapped if we wanted to reach our schedule.
At the same time, design is also one of my favorite aspects of game development -- because you have the freedom to make whatever decisions you want! Unlike software programming or engineering, there's no hard specifications you need to stick to. Remember that idea back at the dawn of flash games that "if you can build it, you can share it?" This magical statement still stands strong today.
If I wanted to draw concept art in Minecraft blocks, make Aya's wings ridiculously large, or reference some (in my definitely-biased opinion) inspirational scenes, all I had to do was make that happen!
Listen, from a technical standpoint, building a game alone is definitely possible. Some of the best games have come out of single-person teams -- the Touhou series is even one of them! I spent a whole chunk of my life in solo development, yet today, I can say with confidence that working together with others is like a whole new world.
Of course, managing a team is hard. There's been disagreements and arguments I wish I had handled better. Plus, I'm working with a bunch of friends in high school here -- so while I'm glad that they're good students, that duty of pulling everyone away from their studies to work on the game falls to me. The fight for time is always ongoing, and I've unfortunately become a regular participant.
The upsides, however, are definitely worth the effort. On a personal level, it's like I've got a perpetual fire on my back, pushing me to finish the game and not give up. "You're the one who dragged us into this mess", I can imagine the team saying, "So you better pull us through to the end". Also, putting my all into a project that we all want to see succeed is just fun. It's admittedly a rare occasion due to the ever-present lack of time, but when everyone gets together to bounce ideas and debate for an afternoon, it's an excitement like almost nothing else.
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