Shoot The Bullet - Development

Development

The only member of Team Shanghai Alice, who goes by the pseudonym "ZUN", recognized that all past installments of the Touhou Project drew inspiration from arcade games, so he wanted to turn all that around and make an experimental PC game that throws arcade conventions aside.

The idea of a danmaku photography game first came to ZUN when he was taking snapshots of bullet patterns during the production of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil so that he could name them into "spell cards" to distinguish one pattern from another. He realized that taking snapshots was quite fun, and the idea should make a good game. After Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, ZUN tried to incorporate this idea into a new weapon type for Reimu Hakurei (the main character of the Touhou Project) where she would take pictures and seal away bullets. However, ZUN felt that he was forcing a totally new idea into the game unnaturally, since none of the characters in the games had a reason to shoot photos; so he filed the idea away for two years until after Imperishable Night was released.

ZUN decided that in order to introduce the idea naturally, he needed a character who actually had a reason to shoot photographs. Thus he created the reporter girl Aya Shameimaru and planned to introduce her in the upcoming game Phantasmagoria of Flower View so that she can become the main character of a future photography game without being too abrupt. During this process, the manga publisher Ichijinsha was planning a manga anthology of Touhou Project dōjinshi, but ZUN decided that he can use this opportunity to introduce Aya, and negotiated with Ichijinsha to turn the anthology into a fanbook that contains samplings of Aya's newspaper. The result was Touhou Bunkachou ~ Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red., which was released three days before Phantasmagoria of Flower View. ZUN had originally planned to include the photography game along with the fanbook, but ZUN did not have enough time to make that happen. Even so, ZUN continued to use the name "Touhou Bunkachou" for his photography game without Ichijinsha's authorization (although Ichijinsha later agreed to let ZUN use the name). Development took a month and a half to finish, and the game Touhou Bunkachou ~ Shoot the Bullet. was finally released on December 30, 2005.

Read more about this topic:  Shoot The Bullet

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