State of Decay #4 (January 2025): Small Updates + Mostly pointless nattering about a few bullet types.

First blog post of the new year, 2025, happy New Year or whatever, I believe some people really care about the passing of a year; it’s not really something *I* care too much about; there’s not much worth celebrating as I see it. Maybe I’m just boring~ Well, what’s my “New Year’s Resolution?” I’d say it’s working harder on Toparo than I ever have before, ideally getting a demo out sooner rather than later - in other words, I don’t really have a resolution, just more of the same.

Anyway a lot happened over the last month, although there’s nothing to really show off, so this blog post will be on the sad and entirely uninteresting side; that wasn’t the original plan but shh! My plans got ahead of me…

First off, there was that whole music preview that the whole of the December post was about, that went mostly as planned apart from one of the videos somehow gaining 500+ views instead of the usual 10-40~ Why? I do not know, I wish the algorithm would have picked a better one, but whatever - pointless numbers going up is just pointless numbers going up at the end of the day. I guess it also got me a few YouTube subscribers however, I doubt any of them are reading this; again, pointless numbers.

Second off, I started practicing making digital art! You can see some of it on my Twitter/Bluesky, I haven’t posted much of it but I have posted a little, even made myself a much nicer looking profile picture; it’s not Toparo related which feels strange but something about that feels *more genuine* or something like that. Anyway, the reason I’ve started this is that I want to make a “cover” for the game based on the cover art for the PC-98 Touhou games, I don’t think I’ll try and match the style 100% but I do want to make sure that the final result looks nice, so it’s probably a good idea to get started with practice sooner rather than later. Also, something that’s currently a pie in the sky idea is that I want to make a nice looking pdf manual or something, which would require a decent bit of art; and I won't settle for just using the sprites in the manual. It won’t end up as detailed as the manual in the game (which’ll hopefully go into excruciating detail), I just want it to look nice, make the game feel a bit more professional, windowdressing really.

Third off, I’ve spent almost the *whole month* drawing bullet sprites, I mentioned on Twitter/Bluesky that I was almost done a few weeks ago, but in actuality, I’m still almost done; I just couldn’t stop myself after I thought of a bunch of extra ideas (ie: adding more bullet variety to somewhat neglected characters/stages/ideas). I’m currently sitting at 113 bullet types (*Not* counting size, colour, or directional variants!) and it’ll grow by about 20~ or so more types once I’m done. Now, you might say, “100+ bullets seems a bit excessive” and you’d be right, but I want a lot of things in the game to make people go “That’s a lot more X in this game than there is in Y.” It’s somewhat related to some of the things discussed in the first blog post; anything that might catch someone’s interest is what Toparo needs if I want anyone to ever care about it, just like the whole four routes + VS mode in one game thing. Whether it ends up as “quantity over quality” is for you to decide once you get your hands on the game (^^;

Looking over this blog post a mere few hours before I’m supposed to post it and I realise that it’s a bit on the shrimp size, how about I take ten or so bullet types and talk about them; that’s clearly what the people want!

It doesn’t get any simpler than this huh..? Play any shmup and I guarantee that you’ll find something that looks like this. I made a bunch of different sizes mostly so that bosses of different sizes can be surrounded by some sort of pulsating “no touching” zone, the biggest size is quite massive and takes up a lot of the playfield. The 8x8 and 16x16 sizes are some of the only sprites to escape unedited from the proof of concept video demo.

Is it a knife or sword? It’ll depend on the context I’m afraid. There’s a couple more knife like bullets beyond this one, most of them based on different types of stabbing implements found throughout all of the Touhou games (including the unique one that only appears in Uwabami Breakers, still surprised that ZUN never reused that one). While there might not be any sword or knife throwing maids, they’ll all see plenty of use I’m sure.

Wow, aren’t you that super cool looking bullet type that appeared in LLS and MS before going into retirement? I’m like, your second biggest fan (after JynX, obviously)! This is one of the first ones I made after deciding that I needed more than just three bullet types; I initially just started out by making my own version of basically every bullet type found in Touhou and its weird siblings, this is probably one of the ones where that’s most obvious.

A Yin-Yang? What are you doing here? Well, out of all the bullet types I’ve made for the game, I’m pretty sure this is the only one I 100% wont use. The problem is that it just doesn’t make sense anymore, the game *has* changed so much over the past (soon to be) three years; this is definitely just a remnant of really early development before I decided to make the game less Japanese influenced (mostly in an effort to make it less directly comparable to Touhou, however little that will help).

Would you believe me if I told you Touhou doesn’t have feather bullets? It’s true, only Seihou has them. Considering that there’s a character with bird wings, this was quite an obvious inclusion although, I have to say, I might have overdone it with the bird based bullet types; there’s like five. Some characters/themes are just far easier to think of bullet types for than others, I just hope it doesn’t come across as too skewed in the final game.

Speaking of bullet types made for exactly one character: Jellyfish (there’s a character that’s based on a jellyfish (the jellyfish character shoots jellyfish (while also having two jellyfish stage enemies created specifically for the jellyfish character that already shoots jellyfish))). What can I say, I like jellyfish, they look cool; make for a cool looking bullet type, ok?

I was trying to think of what kind of bullets a certain important character could have (as at the time, there weren't really any that made sense for them to use), I eventually landed on “dead people” but that seemed a bit blunt; so I decided on the *remains* of dead people, much more subtle. There’s also a bone bullet type to go with this skull. While the big one is very clearly a skull, the small one could pass as many different things; this is something that I’ve tried to incorporate into lot’s of bullet types, the spell name can be used to infer what things are *supposed* to be.

A bullet bullet type. Initially I drew it for the easy pun, but thanks to the game evolving to have a technology theme it means that there’s a whole one stage where it makes sense for the enemies (and two bosses) to actually shoot bullet bullets; although, only one of them has anything that even resembles a gun, hmm…

Speaking of the technology theme and how it only takes up one of the game's stages (despite being in the title), here’s some napalm. Thinking of technology/weaponry bullet types is really easy, I’d say there’s easily over fifteen, all of which have to fight it out for space in the last eight or so minutes of the main story. I chose to show the napalm specifically as it sure does look familiar… some sort of Flying Disk something or other… (It’s actually meant to look like the Napalm Bomb from MegaMan 5, but it sure does look identical to something else).

While there *is* a star shaped bullet type, I thought it was excessive for three of the four (technically five) main characters to have a focus on star based things, so Morgan’s having pentagons instead. In actuality, I thought I might as well fill out as many simple shapes like this as I can, unfortunately, anything more complex than a hexagon just doesn't work for the 8x8 bullet size, so there’s only triangles to hexagons on that front. (Sorry to all the hendecagon fans out there).

I was trying to think of other insects I could have as a bullet type beyond butterflies (thanks for the butterfly Yuyuko) and I came up with bees as something both specific to flowers/gardens as well as something that could be a fill in for more generic types of insects; the shape of a bee is more than good enough for that. Despite being one of the more complicated shapes I’ve tried to turn into bullets, I think the rotation came out really well (I guess you’ll have to take my word for now).

This is the one I showed off about a week or two ago, and my opinion hasn’t changed since, I like it quite a bit. Initially it didn’t have a face and I thought it was a bit on the boring side, so I gave it a face and now it could honestly pass as a stage enemy; who says it can’t be both..?

There, now there’s some meat on this blog post, even if it *is* just me nattering about something not a single person will ever care about.

Well, that’s that then… Hey! Don’t look at me like that~ it’s the New Year, everyone gets to be a bit on the lazy side for the first day or so… I’m just channeling all of my laziness into the blog post and not anything else to do with the game (^^; Honest..!

Here’s to a year of good progress and other such things! I have no real plans other than continuing to work on the game; (hopefully) see you in “Demo 0” sometime soon.

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This month’s crystal ball grazing: When you cross paths with a black cat… um… Hold on the uh, crystal ball is… foggy… Well, I foresaw this, obviously~ I’ll get back to you soon~