About

This page provides some information about TALENA, the Toparo Project and the members of TALENA; there is also contact information, should you want to reach out to a member TALENA.

If you didn’t see the information you were looking for it might be in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).

What is TALENA and the Toparo Project?

TALENA is a doujin circle originally created by Impeli in March of 2022 that is currently focused on creating games and other works for the Toparo Project. As of writing, it currently only has one member: Impeli.

The Toparo Project is primarily a series of Touhou-esque vertical shooter bullet hell games for Windows. The games are planned to feature a large amount of content per entry as well as focus on worldbuilding and lore alongside an interconnecting story that isn’t forced to return to the status quo at the end of every work. The Toparo Project is very obviously inspired by the Touhou, Len’en and Mukai Projects, but it is not a fangame, rather it’s own original work.

How did TALENA and the Toparo Project come to be?

For many years, Impeli had enjoyed drafting up ideas, characters and stories for a “hypothetical” video game; these ideas, while serious and lengthy, were never considered to be in the realm of possibility, they were much more just a: What if? Wouldn’t that be cool? It wasn’t until around 2020 when Impeli realised that it *was* possible to create a video game entirely alone, with little to no outside help; once this realisation was reached, the first truly serious efforts at planning a video game production began, including the creation of the first genuine assets that could be used in a game (such as graphics and music).

Between 2020 and 2022, there were many ideas of what kind of game Impeli was going to create now that the plans also had to be within the realm of possibility for a novice programmer. Initially, a Touhou-esque game was shied away from as Impeli thought that the “genre” had become oversaturated and done to death by that point, by the time actual video game development started, the main idea was to make a bullet hell maze game (although it never got far as an actual game, mostly just a plan and assets). This was the first game that sort of resembled the Toparo Project in its modern form.

After a few months, the idea to make a Touhou-esque shmup was (somewhat reluctantly, at the time) decided to be the best way forward for a multitude of both important and unimportant reasons; and so started the development of TALENA’s first serious video game production: Toapro ~ the Brilliant Shining Light (Proof of Concept Demo) which would be “completed” four and a half months later. After this, it was clear to Impeli that many parts of the game (most importantly the quality of the code) was not up to a high enough standard, even in the realm of free amateur release, so Impeli chose to create two short games exclusively to practise coding and game development in general; during this time, many parts of the Toparo Project were better planned out so that it could have a fulfilling and interesting story/world/characters/etc rather than just being slapdash and very simple.

Over the next year and a half or so, the Toparo Project would be worked on intermittently, now with a clear enough direction that was allowed to change and grow should Impeli think that it would make the final product more interesting and a bit more distanced from its clear inspirations. This process was so extreme that it was decided to halt development of Toapro ~ the Brilliant Shining Light, simply due to the game’s story not making too much sense as a first entry, instead, Toapro ~ the Forgotten Rotting Technology began development as a story that would much better introduce the world and tone as well as an important character or two that otherwise wouldn't be seen for a while. After a few months said game would finally stop growing in scope and decide upon the general size and amount of content that would be included in all future Toparo Project releases; mostly inspired by a critique that most Touhou-esque shmups have a general lack of content and instead rely on playing the same hour and a half or so of game over and over again.

That is the current standing of TALENA and the Toparo Project, please wait patiently for further developments should they happen.

Members of TALENA:

#1 - Founder and only member:

Before you ask, no, this character is not a self insert; he’s just important and his sprite makes for a better profile picture than most. The self insert is someone else ;P

Name:

Impeli (No, you’re not getting my real name).

Age:

Old enough (Legal adult).

Gender:

Should be obvious.

Location:

Look at how I spell “colour” and come to your own judgement.

Languages:

English (Native), Spanish (Very little, reading/listening/speaking only), Japanese (Even less, reading only).

Contact:

Twitter (@ToparoProject), Bluesky (@toparoproject.bsky.social), YouTube (@ToparoProject), email (toparoproject@gmail.com).

(Please keep the emails to just business inquiries. The preferred method for most interactions would be @ing me on Twitter/Bluesky. If you cannot write/read in english, please do not use a translation tool, instead leave it in your preferred language).