This is game I have been working on for roughly two years.
(http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Guitar%20Maiden/GuitarMaidenLogoWinged.png)
Guitar Maiden is a seamless cross-over between Guitar Hero/Rock Band and Touhou Project.
I started coding it with pure DirectX 9.0c and C++, but their low-levelness was making the programming way to difficult for just a single modest programmer alone to code. I remade the code with XNA Game Studio 4.0 and SlimDX and the coding is going very well.
Since the game is being made with XNA, it'll be a PC game and there'll be possibly a XBox360 version.
I'm also making the art alone, since I know a thing or half a thing about drawing and Photoshop. But don't expect some terrific art since I'm a programmer and not really an artist.
(http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Guitar%20Maiden/FEATURES.png)
STORY
> Guitar Maiden retells Touhou's plot in a very unique, beautiful, epic and ROCKING new fashion.
> It introduces a never-seen-before fandom, in which most characters are very different from their original selves (differences including but not limited to: job/class, nationality, religion, appearance, back story, name and personality)
> Includes all characters from Windows era (excluding Mid-Bosses that have no dialogue, such as Koakuma and Momiji, excepting Daiyousei) and some characters of PC-98 era. Excludes characters that only appear on printed works, such as Tokiko and Akyu, excepting Rinnosuke.
> Warning: It is a little NSFW. Contains improper language, constant reference to sexual themes, realistic violence, same-sex love scenes and profanity. No explicit sex scenes because they are a pain in the ass to make.
GAMEPLAY
> Guitar Maiden introduces Touhou series' SpellCard system in the Guitar Hero gameplay. Watch our beloved Danmaku barrages invade a scrolling highway and hit the shots as if they were guitar notes!
> Somewhat like Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock, each Character have her own powers that help the player on his performance. But unlike the aforementioned GH game, these powers actually change the gameplay's flavor instead of simply inflating the player's score.
> Somewhat like Rock Band, each instrument have gimmicks that alter the natural GH-ish gameplay. These instruments gimmicks often sum up with the Characters' personal powers, completing or complementing it.
> It takes up to over 9000 eleven the old GH gameplay elements. The Multiplier can now grow up indefinitely until the max value of an 32-bit integer, but it gets increasingly more difficult to grow as higher it gets. It is humanly impossible to get beyond 1000, so don't worry about Exceptions if you are a very good player.
> Each Character has Stats that influence how many notes she can miss before failing a song, how fast she can build up a Multiplier, the base value of score got from sucessfully played notes and many other things.
> Guitar Maiden brings back the Battle Mode featured in Guitar Hero III Legends of Rock, in a revamped and improved form. You launch against your opponents your Character's SpellCards and also the old Battle Powers. The improved Battle Mode also enables Co-Op, in battles of (1 or 2) vs (1 or 2) players, and it allows any player to be controlled by the computer.
> Guitar Maiden brings the best of Rock Band's band gameplay, improved with the Character's powers and SpellCards, and allowing band members to be controlled by the computer (Perfect for players that don't have many GH/RB controllers or anyone to play with them).
> Play with any combination of four instruments: Guitar, Bass, Drums and Vocal.
> Guitar Maiden innovates the Vocal gameplay. No more microfones, no more players avoiding to play songs they don't know how to sing and no more untoned bad singers! Now you use your keyboard to type the lyrics as they appear, and you also DANCE the music in play in a DanceDanceRevolution fashion with either the keyboards directional arrows or a DDR-complying dancemat.
> Warning: This game is designed to be as difficult as the original Touhou games, which means that even on Easy you will most likely get your ass whooped, and you'll likely take a few months of practice until you can clear a chapter on the Story Mode on Easy.
MUSIC
> Guitar Maiden includes an extensive SetList of around 150 songs.
> Play songs of your favorite Doujin Music circles, such as Demetori, IRON ATTACK!, Dark Phoenix and many others! (provided I can get their permission to use their songs, though)
> Songs are in Ogg Vorbis format, which means high quality song with much-smaller-than-MP3 filesizes!
CUSTOMIZATION
> Guitar Maiden comes with a module called RockForge, that allows to player to create his own charts and also convert charts created with EOF or FeedBack to GM usable format.
> Unlike the PC version of Guitar Hero World Tour, the controls are 100% fully customizable!
> It allows the use of anything DirectInput can recognize as a joystick or gamepad. If you liked to play the old PS2 Guitar Hero titles with your DualShock controller, you can still use it in Guitar Maiden normally! (provided you have an USB adapter to connect your DualShock to your PC if it isn't a PS3 controller)
GRAPHICS
> The gameplay will include backdrops on which our beloved Touhou girls ROCK N' ROLL in 3D on a stage or battle each other on a 3D version of the fighting games.
(http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Guitar%20Maiden/MEDIA.png)
A few screenshots:
The game's Main Menu (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/TitleScreen.png)
A screenshot showing three Notes (the small round ones) that were spawned by a SpellCard. The other Notes in the scene were generated by the Chart. (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/SpellPickSS.png)
A screenshot showing a render of two Highways, each one belonging to a different player. Both players are associated to the same Chart, this is why they look identical (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/MultiplayerSS.jpg)
A screenshot showing a sucessful processing and rendering of five Sustained Notes (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/SustainNotesSS.jpg)
A few samples of the game's art:
(All the drawings I made for this game still need to be colored)
Marisa (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Desenhos/Marisa.jpg)
An unfinished coloring of Marisa's portrait. (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Guitar%20Maiden/MarisaColor.jpg)
Reimu (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Desenhos/001.jpg)
Cirno (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Desenhos/Cirno.jpg)
Sanae (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Desenhos/Sanae-1.jpg) (these are two outfits. The default one is the one to the right)
Tenshi (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Desenhos/Tenshi.jpg)
Kaguya. These things on her hair are poorly drawn dreadlocks (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Desenhos/Kaguya-1.jpg)
Lyrica (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Desenhos/LyricaLunasa-1.jpg)
Mamizou (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Desenhos/Mamizou.jpg)
Meiling. Now she has dragon horns and tail -DEAL WITH IT. Her drums are yet to be finished (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Desenhos/Meiling.jpg)
Koishi (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Desenhos/Koishi.jpg)
Rumia (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Desenhos/Rumia.jpg)
ORIN HAS BADASS SHADES, YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Desenhos/Orin.jpg)
Here are the SetLists for each chapter of the game. Not all SetLists are finished being assembled together yet.
Embodiment of the Death Metal Devil (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBD71B533C36549C5&feature=mh_lolz)
(http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Guitar%20Maiden/DEVELOPMENT.png)
The application is in an quasi-advanced stage of development. Most of the basic and fundamental modules are already made and working.
What is already finished:
-A Independent Resolution Rendering module that enables the game window to have adjustable sizes.
-A GameState module optimized to not to tickle off the .NET Garbage Collector.
-Menu navigation algorithms.
-An algorithm for Hardware Mesh Instancing that will enable hundreds, even thousands of Notes be rendered quickly and efficiently.
-A module to manage Notes (shots generated by Danmaku also count as Notes). It uses a Flyweight Pattern so massive quantities of Notes can be processed with minimal memory overhead.
-Action-Oriented configurable Input module for keyboard.
-Highway code, including animation and scrolling.
-Instrument-specific code.
-A Custom Shader that enables the Highways to be rendered with Multi-Texturing.
-A Chart module that enables a song's Notes to be scripted into a txt file and be properly loaded by the game.
-Enabled the user to select how many Fret buttons he wants to use, ranging from 3 to 5, like any GH/RB title. The difference is that if there are less than 5 frets, the Fret buttons are spanned all along the X dimensions of the Highway.
What I still need to finish until the game can reach a playable Alpha version:
-Implement Band Mode code. DONE!
-Implement Battle Mode code.
-Implement the basic code for the Story Mode.
-Implement a simple Artifical Intelligence to enable players to play with or against the computer.
-Implement a few kinds of Notes, such as Sustained Notes and Chords. The Sustained Notes are proving themselves to be kinda difficult to make... DONE!
-Implement a few SpellCard scripts for the Characters.
-Implement the RockForge module so Charts can be made.
What I still need to finish until the game can reach Gold version:
-SlimDX Input algorithms for support of non-XBox360 gamepads.
-99% of the art, including Menu arts, character portraits, character 3D Models and background 3D models.
-Implement code for generating and managing the Backdrops. It'll be a huge monster to make!
-Implement all the Character's SpellCard and behavior scripts.
-Implement a module that will separate the Character's code in a DLL so the game can be easily updated without patches.
-Implement all Story Mode's scripts.
Well... That's it for now. I'll update this thread as I make progress on the game's development.
I can't really estimate a time until I can finish at least a Demo, because many unpredictable problems can appear on the code and I usually take a day or two solving just a single bug, let alone that I need to do lots of college-related activities.
Please, leave an opinion. If you have any question about the game or it's source code, I'll gladly answer.
#Update 23/05/2012
Finally I managed to finish the Sustained Notes' and Chords' code. All their logics and rendering are finished and tested. Took me a week and a half to make these, partly because the I had to figure out a way to scale the Sustained Notes' tails in a way they would span for exactly an amount of time the Chart wanted, and partly because I discovered a gruesome bug on the graphics when I was making the Sustains graphics.
Now I'll proceed to increment the Input module. It enables only one human player and no computer players, and also has no support for non-XBox360 joysticks and gamepads. When I'm done with the multiplayer Input, I'll see if can implement the Battle and Band modes.
Meanwhile, I'm taking some part of my time coloring Marisa's portrait. My coloring technique involves HUGE amounts of Pen Tool, thus it is very time costly.
#Update 12/06/2012
I've finished implementing a GameState meant to be a Loading Screen. It properly spawns a worker Thread to do the biding of loading everything before the next GameState can run.
It was somewhat of a pain to code because XNA's ContentManager isn't Thread-Safe, which caused some annoying bugs. Happily, it's not difficult to make a Thread-Safe version of the ContentManager, so I just had to create a new class for it and replace all ContentManager references to the new Thread-Safe version. That last one was the hardest part because it was a lot of code to refactor.
With the Loading Screen coding done, I got another important part of the code dealt with, helping with finishing the Band Mode gameplay.
I have no screenshot of the Loading Screen for now because it only draws a boring black screen while it does the loading.
While I was at it, I made a small optimization on the resource management of the game as a whole. Now it loads the most often used resources on the application's start-up, making all of the Loading Screens throughout the gameplay considerably faster at cost of making the application's start-up a little slower. Well, I'm pretty sure that the PC version of Guitar Hero 3 does this because it takes so long to start-up but the loading screens before the song plays are so fast.
As for the game's art, I didn't do much of it. I scanned some more drawings and posted them on the "A few samples of the game's art" section.
#Update 17/06/2012
The Band Mode code is mostly done! Now I'm proceeding to code the Artificial Intelligence for the computer players, and I'm also remaking some of the game's textures to improve it's appearance.
With an finished Artificial Intelligence algorithm, I will implement an Animated Sprite Renderer and a Particle System for further improving the game's appearance. For now, there is no SFX for the Notes when they are hit, which is bad for player feedback. Fortunately, implementing animated sprites and particle systems is relatively trivial, at least compared to other advanced algorithms and Design Patterns used in the code.
I also posted a almost-finished coloring of Marisa's portrait (http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/Net_Warrior/Guitar%20Maiden/MarisaColor.jpg). Go see it on the Media section.
If you wanna know the SetList for the first chapter of the game, click here (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBD71B533C36549C5&feature=mh_lolz) or go to the Media section.