Imperishable Night - Development

Development

The sole creator of the game, a man who goes by the pseudonym ZUN, had long wanted to make a shooting game where the player can switch between two characters easily during the game, since he perceived that there wasn't many games with such a system. The idea for Imperishable Night started with this desire, and the plot was written later to justify this system. He has had the idea before the making of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, but he felt that having playable characters that were not previously introduced would be unnatural. Thus he decided to make the system in Team Shanghai Alice's third game, Imperishable Night, so he could introduce new characters in the first and second game.

ZUN found it particularly difficult to find a youkai character to pair Reimu and Marisa with. In the end, ZUN picked Alice from the pre-Windows games to be Marisa's partner since he thought Alice was a "Youkai version of Marisa", and thus reintroduced her in Perfect Cherry Blossom. Yukari was selected to be Reimu's partner because their personalities were similar and would make sense to be together.