Legend of the Missing Strawberries

Legend of the Missing Strawberries is a fan made Touhou based side scroller bullet hell game.  It requires some explaining.  You the player control Vector, who is a real programmable robot from the company Digital Dream Labs in Pittsburgh, PA (Originally from Anki in San Francisco, CA).  This is the first playable demo.  There are bugs yet and the game needs a lot of polishing, but it is playable and contains lots of neat elements and features.

If you are not familiar with the Touhou games, they are predominantly top-down bullet hell games.   The cast of characters are almost all female.  In each game, there is an incident that is caused by one of the characters that causes trouble for everyone else.  The heroines of the story investigate the incident, and battle to get to the person causing the issue.

The incident in this story is that the strawberries are not blooming, and the Touhou girls need these strawberries for food to survive.  Marisa Kirisame from the Touhou Project finds Vector the robot, and she asks him to help figure out why the strawberries are not blooming.  

The gameplay concept is fairly straight forward.  I don't have customizable key controls yet.  Until then these are the controls:
z -> Fire weapon

x -> Jump

c -> Spell Cube (special weapon - equivalent to Bomb in Touhou games)

Arrow keys ->  left move Vector left, right moves Vector right.  Up and Down don't do anything.

Basically you move to the right, destroying the enemies (fairies) and eventually get to a boss to battle. 

The music is currently from HertzDevil, and a little bit of my own (under the name binarypearl).  I plan to include other youtuber's music as well who make Touhou covers to help get lesser known people more exposure.  I try to find artists who release their songs with permissive licenses or are open to have people use their music.  I give credit in both opening title screens, credits scene, and in-game in Vector's HUD (Head Up Display) as well.  

The Touhou character sprites were made from Miku Miku Dance models.  Credit is given where possible to indicate where I got the models from.  

Overall software projects used:

Blender

Gimp

GameMakerStudio 2

There are many pop culture references in this game.  Kind of like Family Guy, you may not recognize all of the references, but hopefully you pick up some of them.  

The story I have planned for this game is very complex and will evolve over the coming stages.  At this point in development, we are only at stage 0, and the foundations of the story are being laid out.  Hints of what's to come are present though in the current demo.

The biggest 'bug' at the moment is that the fairies (enemies) often go up into the upper rocks, and get turned around and move and fire in the wrong direction.  This will take me some time to figure out a better solution for enemy movement.  

Overall I'm happy with the progress so far.  Making video games is complex, and I can only do so much in my spare time.   It makes me appreciate the amount of effort that goes into any developed video game.   

The game is currently Windows only, primarily because I make use of videos created in Blender for various cutscenes.  I have a really good Video player addon with GameMaker Studio 2 (Video Player Extreme), but it's Windows only.  If I can find a way to make the video cutscenes work in other OS's, then I don't see why I couldn't port it to multiple platforms.  

Digital Dream Labs also has another robot Cozmo, which you need to be familiar with to understand the parody cut-scene at the end of the stage. 

To make Vector and Cozmo talk, I have developed a project called IBCP (Inner Bot Communication Protocol).  To see both robots in action playing a game of NumberGuesser with each other (Guess a number between 1 and 50), check out this example video:

Hope you can enjoy what I have so far.