I finally finished drawing animated frames of all 5 bosses (+ a tiny feather on player character's head) and It's Tumbling time!

As I said in the previous post I wanted to put some dialogues in the game because the official Touhou games always have it and it would feel very empty without. But the problem was that the character artworks I drew back in the day all look straight towards the camera and that's wrong. They should be slightly tilted towards the main character portrait. So since I'm gonna be redrawing them to tilt properly, I took the opportunity to elevate them to a slightly higher level than minimalist doodles. Because although "minimalism" is a nice aesthetic style. It's just not my preferred one. In my history, I did some minimalist style things merely because I couldn't do better.
Now I say "part 1" because these are only the dialogue screen portraits. I need to draw another versions for their in-game model/sprite. Because if I just scale them down and call it a day, all the details will be clumped together into a horrible mash of pixels. There need to be another version purposefully drawn with as minimal detail as possible to look good and proper as a small in-game sprite. Plus, they would be animated which I'm incredibly overwhelmed by. Then again, every new work of art is overwhelming.

I wanna talk about a strange phenomenon that happened to me while I was drawing them. Please don't get it wrong, it's gonna sound like I'm humble bragging if you just read it without context, but that's not it.
So I'm drawing cartoon characters. But I'm not a cartoon artist in a way that my intuition is built to create abstract cartoon characters. And what's happening is that my intuition is to draw real humans and real physics when I don't need to and shouldn't be bound by that. When drawing the hands, I should be thinking of them as nothing but a wobbly circle. But I can't. I keep seeing it as mittens covering a real hand. It's not that this strange feeling helped me to create anatomically correct characters of course, lol. It's just an interesting inner conflict of my intent and the art. It's like forcing a horror writer to write a comedy book. I believe it's because I never really watched much cartoon growing up. I never gave any shit about TV. I just went from playing with rocks as a baby boy to becoming a computer addict and play fantasy games with that classic fantasy artstyle such as Warcraft and watch some anime.

Oh I also didn't bother drawing the feet because they're gonna be out of camera.

So this one's very long. Prepare a cup of drink, I advice.
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Ok before we get to it, wordpress and blogger are free only if you're a CSS programmer. Otherwise you have to pay $40 a month plan which will allow you to use plugins that unlock the full power of blogging. Without it, it's nothing more than notepad.exe. So I'm just gonna do the shit on photoshop (not exactly photoshop™) and put it out as one big picture.
Also our beloved SubscribeStar here seems to have addressed their notification issue.

So, I will release two danmaku games. One is a very simple Touhou clone with no special mechanics whatsoever. Because I as it's my first large scale game, I wanted my learning ground to be clear and concise. And after that I will make another, bigger game that is still Touhou-like at the foundation but build a lot more on top.

For that reason, when I first started making this game, I didn't plan to put too much time and effort into making it pretty. I planned it to be just a throw-away game that exists solely as an academic project. But after such a long time of working on it, I grew attached to it and suddenly I couldn't bring myself to purposefully half-ass it.

So, initially I had two restrictions for above reason:

But now these two "restrictions" are removed. And I have already accomplished the first change. As I realize how artistically boring it is for the same looking enemies to reluctantly crawl onto the screen, I decided to make each stages to have unique enemy spawning animations. Of course, the simple rolling onto the screen will also be mixed in.

Also important note here. This website is not only not equipped for blogging, it's been suffering from quite serious syncing problem for months now. When you like and/or comment on my posts, that will not appear on my screen until after about 20 days. So from now on I will look to use a proper blogging websites like Wordpress to keep you in touch. And here will only be links to there. So, if you have any comments to leave, do so there when I setup a wordpress or something.

for the puppet and the ghost

First one is used for the main pose but then I changed the off-hand from touching his scarf into holding it around his chest with the help of that stock photo of a hand. As I'm not a professional, I don't know how to draw a non-animated still image to convey the motion or the intent of the puppet reaching his hand up to the ghostly face on his shoulder. Now it looks like he's making a highschool graduation speech with his hand on the chest.

The reference art on the top right side of a woman is a randomly found art on Twitter I bookmarked a year ago finally coming to fruition.

QUEEN MARIKA (ooh Elden Ring) is used to look and weakly study how cracks work. I'm incredibly glad I did that. Because if I just went in blindly otherwise on the cracks, the entire art would look very bad. Thank you Your Majesty.

I didn't even google "blue fire" like some kind of an idiotic non-touhou-fan, ew. Before I even started drawing, I already knew to use Shion Yorigami's fiery hair as a reference.

Finally, I couldn't find any reference for the ghost's hands. So I just quickly took a selfie and used my real hands as a reference. Then I immediately deleted them afterwards because I just hate selfies for no reason.