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- 2025/02/22 -

This week, I released Sunrise Doll R.

After two and a half months of intense development, most of the remaining parts of Sunrise Doll are finished. I have to confess that even though the total development time of the game almost reaches five years, the bulk of the active development process (including coding as well as drawing and general brainstorming) barely fills up a tenth of that time.

The campaign, as said before, spans 25 stages, with each fifth stage being a boss, alternating between normal and "peer" bosses, culminating with the final boss. The original 10 stages from the trial version of SDR have been tinkered with. Stages 07 and 09 have been slightly edited, and the other eight stages have been preserved. Most of these stages have been repositioned throughout the campaign as well. The original order was not based on difficulty curves or mechanic complexity. For example, the Eyes, which I have mentioned earlier are supposed to be harbingers of the endgame, appeared as early as stage 03. The order was based on the order of the characters in the closing section of【東方アレンジ】紅～紺2ボスメドレー【Touhou Medley】, with each character highlighed in the visuals of the video corresponding to the general feeling of each element of SDR.

The enemy behavior has not been changed since the trial version, although Prime Sin did get some changes. The wonky way this boss receives damage was an oversight caused by my attempt to make sure a single slash of the Blade of Banishment does not register as a damage source on every frame of the game. As this boss often attacks with many pellets, it also gets attacked with many reflected pellets, and most of them fly through it while the temporary invincibility is active. I have tested this boss with a fix, but found out that it requires boosting the boss health by a lot, which in turn makes the limbless phase too tedious: as the number of pellets decreases, so does the rate at which the boss loses health. I have decided to revert the change and keep Prime Sin with its wonky damage mechanism, elevating it to the feature of the character.

Ilriss, being designed to exclude the possibility of direct sword attacks, does not have a long invincibility period, but an oversight still exists: her hitbox shuts down for a single frame upon receiving damage, which means that if two or more sources of damage happen on the same frame, only one of them will be registered. This is an exceptionally rare event in the boss fight, and I decided to keep this oversight in for mostly harmless fun.

Speaking of "peer" bosses, the game now rewards the player with points whenever the boss is dealt damage. This system is equivalent to the system of gaining points from absorbing souls: every hit raises the score counter as well as the combo counter, and receiving damage or swinging the blade resets the combo counter. This is a minor change that slightly affects the player's behavior and introduces the active score change during the boss fight, to complement the way the score changes during the regular stages. Additionally, as every "peer" boss has exactly 100 health, there is a guarantee that at some point in the process of defeating them the player will receive an extra life.

Pawn herself has received two changes.

When developing and playtesting the three new bosses, I have noticed that a lot of the time Pawn's swings seemingly miss the pellets I am aiming for. The reason for this is the way the Blade hitboxes are set up.

As seen in the picture, there is a large blind spot between the two clusters of hitboxes, which can easily house a small pellet whenever Pawn swings her sword. I suspect that this is a leftover from the old idea that the sword hitboxes are supposed to consist of only sweet spots, punishing the player for not utilizing them properly, but I can't seem to find this idea documented anywhere. The hitbox that extrudes towards the center of Pawn violates this idea anyway, and combined with the repeated annoyance of missing the incoming attacks, I have decided to expand the inner hitbox area.

There is still a tiny blind area, but it is extremely unlikely that it will matter in the gameplay now. This change also makes Pawn's sideways attacks stronger, which makes walking into a barrage of pellets easier.

The second change is that of Pawn's own hitbox. Since SDR's hitboxes are all rectangular and most of the things the player will interact with are circular, there are oftentimes moments when Pawn gets hit by the edge of a pellet's hitbox without the graphics reflecting said hit. To address this, since Pawn's hitbox is already smaller than her sprite, it has been further made slightly smaller.

On the system side of things, the menus have received a small but important update: actions that lead to leaving the game have a confirmation step now, preventing accidental loss of progress. This is something that should have been in SDR since the moment the menu system was implemented, and I apologize for taking this long to implement such a basic function.

The stage editor has been updated with backgrounds from the campaign, and the stage loader is now much more failproof, replacing invalid values with defaults and cleaning up various exploits that could potentially be loaded from the stage files.

There are still some parts of the game that I have not implemented. Most notably, SDR still does not have a soundtrack, nor does it have other planned features such as the replay function. I have decided to release the game without these features, as they are outside of the scope of my abilities, and require extra training. Even though I am using sound effects made by other people (credit to Osabisi, http://osabisi.sakura.ne.jp/m2/), I want the soundtrack to be that of my own. The replay feature haunts me with SDR's use of floating point numbers and the potential inconsistency of how different computers handle calculations with them. While I have ideas of how to circumvent this issue, they involve enormous amounts of work, and I am not sure if it would lead anywhere.

The release of SDR is available at https://dropodo.itch.io/sunrise-doll. Please enjoy the game. Thank you all who have pushed me to bring this game to where it is today.