The founder of Ephemeral Entertainment, ExPorygon, got her start in game development around 2011. It was that year that she discovered Touhou Project thanks to her college friends. As a player, ExPorygon started from being unable to 1cc normal mode to eventually 1ccing about half of the games’ lunatic modes within a couple of years.

It was during this time that she also discovered Touhou Danmakufu after watching Johnny Walker’s Beatrice, the Golden Witch. Excited by the idea that she could someday make something like that herself, ExPorygon began to research more about Danmakufu. She found out that Danmakufu is a fan-made scripting engine designed to make Touhou-like shmups with a relatively simple C-like scripting language. Despite not having any prior programming experience, ExPorygon dived straight into various tutorials and quickly made her first boss fight. While primitive in design, this script marked the beginning of ExPorygon’s Danmakufu career.

From that point on, ExPorygon began making more small Touhou boss fights, slowly increasing in size and complexity. As her experience grew, so did her ambition, culminating in her first full game. It was known as Touhou Kingdom of Mushrooms, a crossover game between the Touhou and Super Mario universes. Unfortunately, around 2013 development progress had lost steam and the game slowly became abandoned.

Around the same time, ExPorygon became entranced by a new idea for a game. It was an idea that came up in conversation with her friend, Sturmgeschuts, and it involved a Touhou fan game starring the lesser used characters from the games. The two of them agreed to make the idea a reality, with Sturm writing the script and plot while ExPorygon handling the programming. And thus, Ephemeral Unnatural Balance was born. Development of the game was turbulent at times and long stretches of no coding were frequent. Despite this, a demo of the game was eventually finished in 2015.

During this time, the team behind EUB slowly grew. Another programmer, gtbot, was brought on board to handle the game’s 3D backgrounds. Spectral Nexus volunteered his original music. AchySolrock, first a fan of the game, would later become an essential provider of sprite graphics. Fellow doujin developer Popfan provided even more graphics and music. ExPorygon’s longtime friend Trickysticks became a self-appointed flavor text writer and story assistant.

ExPorygon decided to give a name to the ever-growing development team that she now found herself surrounded by. Initially named Porygon Productions, after her internet pseudonym, she later renamed it to Ephemeral Entertainment to avoid potential trademark conflicts.

Ephemeral Unnatural Balance finally released in August 2019 and DLC is currently in production. Looking even further to the future, Ephemeral Entertainment aims to finish EUB by June 2018 and publish it to Steam. Following that, Sturm and ExPorygon have another proposed Touhou fan game idea that will likely be explored. Even further down the line, ExPorygon aims to begin a new original game venture, codenamed Project: DOMAIN.