Greetings, internet! It’s been a while since our last blog post, and even longer since the start of Ephemeral Unnatural Balance’s development. Now, EUB is rapidly approaching completion, and to complement this we’re giving these Devlog posts a fresh start. This post will be the first of a series that discusses the game’s stages: reasons behind design decisions, issues we’ve faced along the way and other fun little tidbits.

We’ve played Stage 1 so many times that we’re absolutely sick of it.

In terms of design, Stage 1 is pretty simple and standard. It was the first stage of the game to be developed and was released in 2013 as a standalone prototype, version 0.11. System-wise, the game was pretty different back then. Discord doesn’t generate life pieces, which makes sense because the Balance gauge drains far more quickly. All Balance is lost when the player dies, a feature that luckily didn’t last very long. What did last long was most of everything else – Stage 1 has remained nearly the same since its initial creation.  The only significant changes are during the Tojiko fight – her first spell and Encore Spell in particular. The Encore Spell was almost entirely redone. Her first nonspell also got a bit of visual polish, but it plays identically.

This version of Tempest of Susanō was used in the 0.11 prototype. The arrows come from Tojiko’s left and right, and she helps out by firing rings of yellow bullets. Since Encore Spells are completely optional patterns that the player faces if the Balance meter is high enough, they can typically afford to be more difficult or gimmicky than a regular pattern. However, we decided it was still too much. It’s pretty easy to memorize, but memorization in Stage 1 is pretty weird and not very fun.

This version of Tempest of Susanō is what will ultimately be in the finished product. It still makes use of zig-zagging arrows, but they only come from one central location. We thought it was a much simpler pattern to read, and doable on the very first try if you’re good enough. Play-testers liked it more and it’s more fun than the old one, so it’s here to stay.

While there weren’t many changes pattern-wise, there were plenty of updates to the visuals and the story. Almost everything visually in the stage has been updated, from elements of the HUD to character art to the bullets themselves. Stage 1 was supposed to take place as the player leaves the Hakurei Shrine to start her adventure, but you wouldn’t know it from the background. Both of the earlier versions of the background depicted some sort of path which was supposed to be to the shrine. However, one was merely a prototype and the other didn’t play well with AMD graphics devices. You can see these below:

The leftmost image is from the prototype, while the background pictured in the center hated my AMD card. The rightmost image will be in the final version – the sun rises as time goes by, brightening the screen.

A sunrise makes sense, as the Stage 1 theme is Dream Sunrise. This song hasn’t changed much, but the Stage 1 boss theme changed drastically. Porygon goes into more detail about this stage’s music in her post coming soon.

Interestingly, Tojiko wasn’t actually the first boss to be made for EUB. To get to her, we’ll have to move on to stage 2.

…Also here’s something silly that Futo did at one point.

Welcome! My name is Luna “ExPorygon” Oswald, and I am the director and lead programmer of 東方逆妙乱 ~ Ephemeral Unnatural Balance as well as the founder of Ephemeral Entertainment. I’d like to personally thank you for joining me on this exploration of the development of EUB.

So let’s not waste any time! Ephemeral Unnatural Balance began its life sometime during 2012 (it’s hard to remember exactly when). I had recently joined the Walfas Station Wagon skype group and had made a number of friends, including Sturmgeschuts, a fanfiction writer. I don’t really remember how it came up, but we were talking about overlooked characters in the Touhou Project series, especially the ones that only appeared as midbosses. We basically thought, “What if there was a game that starred all of those characters?” That’s how the idea of EUB came to be. Sturm would write the story and I would program the game.

While I was still developing another game, the Touhou-Mario crossover, Kingdom of Mushrooms, my will to continue it was on the the decline. The game was…weird to say the least. Honestly, the reason I started that project was partly due to my extreme enthusiasm for making danmaku patterns at the time, as I had recently learned how to program with Danmakufu. I longed to explore what sort of danmaku patterns that characters outside of Touhou would use. This is why I made the Doopliss halloween script and I kind of wish I had just stopped there. What I really mean is, I wish I had simply made standalone boss fights of the characters I wanted to do, instead of making a full game complete with a story. And the story is where the game kind of falls into the weirdness. As someone who usually finds crossover stories to be jarring, weird, and sometimes cringy, I don’t know why I decided to try and make one myself. The time-saving decision to make all of the players have the same dialogue wasn’t helping matters. I still think the story has a few redeeming qualities, like the Bowser dialogue and my plan for Doopliss, but it’s still pretty strange. By 2012-2013, I had begun to realize that the game would at best be seen as a weird meme game among the community, even if it was super well designed (and it wasn’t). I was longing to make a “real” fan game, one that could proudly stand alongside the likes of Concealed the Conclusion and the recently-released The Last Comer. The idea for EUB came along at the perfect time and even though I said that I would finish KoM eventually, I think I knew all along that that really wasn’t likely to happen.

So we hit the ground running with EUB. I started designing the players and Sturm began writing the story. To fit with the theme, we decided to make the incident about a power reversal spell that would be unleashed upon Gensokyo. Traditionally powerful characters would become weak and vice versa. The name, Ephemeral Unnatural Balance was chosen by Sturm to represent the game, as it’s about a short-lived, unusual balance of power brought about by the spell. Here is one of the earliest mock-covers for the game, made by kapakaval (uploaded by Sturm).

Unfortunately, we couldn’t have known at the time that Double Dealing Character would ultimately beat us to the theme of flipping the status quo on its head. Luckily, there were enough key differences between the two games that it ultimately did not matter much (not to mention a difference of 5 years in release). For example, Seija was aiming to overthrow society but was stopped before she could. In EUB, the upheaval has already started, and the effects are evident by the power and demeanor of the encountered characters.

By late 2013, Sturm had already completed the entire script for the game. I was blown away by it! More than anything, the script signaled to me that this is really happening, that EUB was going to be the Touhou fan project that I had dreamed it of being! More motivated than ever, I set out to making music and starting the actual design of the stages and bosses!

That’s all I’ll cover for now, the next devlog will continue with the development of Stage 1. Thank you for reading and we’ll see you next time!