A certain magical shooter - My Touhou-Inspired Game Jam Project

Hey there,

today I'll be writing about an old game I've made for a gamejam which I actually rather like, A certain magical shooter, the source code is also on GitHub if you want to look at the messy internals.

What is A Certain Magical Shooter?

I tried to mostly recreate the gameplay of earlier Touhou games, with the minor twist that it's going left to right instead of bottom to top.

During development I tried not to be too overambitious and instead just polish some minor mechanics, one way to accomplish this was that I finished pretty much the core gameplay on day one, in the following days I then added nice graphics and lots and lots of polish, just making sure everything fit together.

Unique Technical Features & Game Mechanics

I think that it plays rather well, but you can be the judge of that. Regarding the internals there is one rather weird decision I made, and that is that I wrote a very rudimentary Lisp/S-Expression syntax for defining when and where the enemies would spawn and when/where they would shoot.

The way this works is that this language actually has a lot of fibers, one for each enemy that is on screen. Then we can just define a sequence/path which this enemy travels along, changing the shoot rate as we travel along the path.

Now since the time limit was quite tough, I think the original plan was 3 days which then got extended to 4 at the last minute which was probably a great idea since one entire unplanned day for adding polish was fantastic and I think everyone's entries improved by a lot due to this.

Regarding the implementation: I'd have to look at the code to be sure, but I think I used native JS Datatypes, mainly arrays instead of Cons-cells. The reader was implemented via some regular expressions which turned the S-Expression syntax into JSON which we could then easily read, this whole construction was rather unstable and led to lots of frustrations during development.

Key Lessons from Game Development

Quite a bit actually, mainly that it's better to do less, but focus on doing the things one actually ends up doing well. I also learned a lot about pixel art and animation which was a conscious decision beforehand since I used Phaser which I've already used for a couple of games making the whole coding aspect rather relaxed, that way I could put all efforts into making the gameplay and art as good as possible.

I also tried and make some music using AI tools of the day but the results were all terrible, really glad I found a site of this Japanese composer creating BGM in a Touhou style which was fantastic to listen to and free to use.

Future Improvements & Reflections

I would not create my own language/syntax, I should have just stuck to JS and used Promises/Generators instead, by now it's probably not as much of an issue anymore since there are tools like Cursor which can take over the grunt work.

Also add a bit more story/character, think it might have improved the overall experience quite a bit and would have been true to the original.

Adios, べン