Hello internet, ExPorygon here. At the behest of my wonderful friend Trickysticks, I have decided to try to keep up a proper Devlog for Ephemeral Unnatural Balance. Each day progress is made for the game, I’ll note it here with occasional screenshots, audio, and video clips as well.

But since I’ve not done a single one thus far and quite a lot has changed since the first release, this warrants what I’m going to call a Dev Rundown. Basically, this is a larger version of the typical Devlog and chronicles all significant changes since the last one. Since this is the first one, I’ll just describe all the big changes since the release of v0.11, which was the single stage demo.

Ephemeral Unnatural Balance’s development has been progressing rather slowly. My wonderful work ethic is 100% to blame for this slow progress but I’ve been picking up the slack as of late. Stage 2 is nearly complete and ready for private testing, with only difficulty levels being left to implement. Stage 3’s bosses have also been finished on one difficulty and half of the stage itself as well. Fortunately, all player characters have already been mostly completed far in advance. The second player intended for the demo release needs a slight rework, but she’s mostly ready.

Nearly all music tracks for the game have also been finished. The only exceptions are the Stage 4 theme, Stage EX theme, Ending theme, and Credits theme. There may be a few additional tracks that I might decide to add, but that will be done at a much later date. Once I’m comfortable releasing a video of Stage 2 I’ll be sure to release the appropriate tracks here as well. I’ve also been tweaking a lot of the tracks I already thought I had finished as some of them are older and not quite up to my current standards. Because of this, any music heard in any release of EUB is subject to change in the next version.

On another artistic front, I now have an official artist for the game. I’ve decided that the existing character portraits present in v0.11 will instead serve as placeholders for official commissioned art specifically for the game. I’d like to present the official artist of Ephemeral Unnatural Balance, Sixten! Sixten is an experienced Doujin artist who is responsible for a number of manga-related works. I highly recommend checking out his website.

Here are a couple of examples of some of the character art that will be present in the game:

With all that in mind, I’m also making another announcement. I have decided that I’m going to showcase the full finished game at this year’s TouhouCon. For those who don’t know, TouhouCon is a new western Touhou specific convention that started last year. It’s held in Anaheim, California, USA and takes place during the weekend of September 18-20. In addition I plan to sell physical copies at the convention if possible. Right now the tentative plan is to sell physical copies (to help make up for the production costs) and to distribute digital copies online for free after an undetermined period of time following the convention.

This means that all assets lifted from copyrighted sources (i.e. ZUN) that are currently present in the game must be replaced before the final release. Here’s a brief list of what you should expect to be replaced in the upcoming versions (excluding character portraits):

-Shot graphics
-Enemy sprites
-Background textures and sprites
-Sound effects
-Player shot and bomb graphics

Fortunately, I have plans in motion for replacing nearly all of these. For boss sprites, I’ll be making my own out of the art that Sixten is providing for each character. It’s a bit of a time consuming trial and error process, but I’ve managed to find a way to manipulate still portraits into animated sprites as you can see here:

Generic fairy sprites will be a bit more tricky as I lack any portrait to manipulate. Fortunately, I know one or two spriters that can hopefully provide the missing sprites. I just hope that they don’t look out of place next to the new boss sprites. For background textures, I’ve found a number of websites out there offering a variety of images and textures for commercial use. Many of these textures have already been put to use. Sound effects used to be something that I worried about until I found this amazing library of sounds, all free to use commercially. You may recognize many of the sounds in this library, as multitudes of japanese developed games also utilize it. Finally, shot and bomb graphics are either going to be made by myself or one of my acquaintances. In fact, my friend AchySolrock has already developed new player graphics for nearly all the players as you will see in the next showcase. Anything not listed has either come from a royalty free source or was made from scratch by myself. This includes the various visual effects and system graphics.

TLDR: I’m gonna try to sell the game, so graphics, sounds, etc. are subject to change.

Well, I think that about wraps up this Dev Rundown. These rundowns won’t be very frequent, maybe once a month if enough gets done during it. Unlike a certain other person coughSparencough I won’t be using this Devlog as a glorified diary of developments. What this means is that future Devlogs will not be nearly as wordy and may sometimes just consist of a bulleted list. In fact, not even future Dev Rundowns will likely be as long as this post was.

Thanks for reading and don’t hesitate to drop a question if anything comes to mind!