This is the Amiten script for Perfect Freeze from Touhou 6.

View it in high resolution so it’s readable!

Here’s a more complex set of patterns, recreated from a boss battle in Touhou 6.

It’s great to see that my engine can handle the same kind of maneuvers that my favorite shmup series can!

And here’s the most recent Amiten video!

It has lava magma bullets!

Here’s the most extensive video showcase of Amiten I have so far.

It’s a sample stage with four simple patterns, but it shows some pretty interesting things that are possible with the scripting.

Amiten

This is my greatest accomplishment so far, and the culmination of several years of trying to figure out the best way to program a bullet-hell game in Game Maker. Here’s the whole story:

It started with the dreadfully inefficient timeline-based scripting in Kuhaku, which you can see if you scroll down a bit. This involved a lot of manual setting of bullets’ speeds, directions, colors, etc. I also didn’t know how to use for loops, so making rings of bullets took longer than I am willing to admit.

Eventually, Kuhaku became Void, which was a vast improvement. Still using timelines, an overly-complex “ID” system for bullets replaced manual entry of bullet properties, but the patterns were still hard-coded into the game.

Void became Lotus, which further optimized the system by enhancing the inefficient ID system with flexible scripts. But there was still something missing.

Everything came together nicely when Lotus transformed into Amiten. It featured a new graphical style, and fully customizable pattern scripts. Instead of coding the patterns into the game directly, they are loaded from external files. Anyone who understands basic programming can make their own bullet patterns with ease!

Although most of the basic features of Amiten are finished, there is a lot of scripting work to do before the game is ready to be released. I would like to have six stages of pre-made content available at release, and so far I have only put together a bunch of test patterns. Assembling entire stages is fun, but it’s very slow, even with the flexibility of externally-defined patterns.

I kind of forgot that this blog existed, so I’ll be dumping a bunch of screenshots and videos of the projects I’ve been working on for the last few months.

This is a map from a Super Metroid hack I was planning to do. Not only did I block out the areas, but I even detailed each screen…

I did have a lot of spare time before I was the drum major…

If you look moderately closely, you can find these locations on the map in the previous post! (+5 insight points per location found!)

Posting multiple pictures always scales them down :\

Here are the ones that were too small to see.

I’ve been looking through my old work to see if anything is worth posting here…

I got a couple good game-design related ones.

I still need to scan some of my new work too~