What inspires you in your character development?
The characters, for the most part, are inspired by
mythology. In the original story, Susano'o plays a prank on the sun goddess Amaterasu, and in her anger, she hides herself in a cave, covering the world in darkness, until she can be convinced to return.
Kasumi came from the idea that I find excessively funny of a low-level bat youkai who everybody thinks is a vampire due to her appearance.
Yayoi was largely because I needed a weak throwaway youkai for stage 1. When I read about the
Otoroshi and its mythical penchant for hanging out on top of shrine gates, the stage 1 scenario of a wayward Otoroshi taking over the Hakurei Shrine came together quickly. The Otoroshi's penchant for leaping out and surprising people inspired her ability to hide in plain sight, which in turn inspired her disappearing/reappearing danmaku attacks.
Gara plays the role of Tachikarao-no-mikoto, the god of strength who pulled the boulder out from in front of the cave in the original myth. Her rocket punch attacks come from a combination of her role as a strength-based god (punching), her proximity to the kappa due to being on Youkai Mountain (technology), and my love of mecha anime (Mazinger). She's a yama-uba because I needed a nice mountain-like youkai.
Akeno is because I wanted an animal youkai, and asked myself, what kinds of cool animals live in dark, secluded corners of the world? The angler fish was the obvious option, which inspired both her blindfold and her lure. Hers is probably my favorite visual design to come out of my lead artist.
Yuzuki was created because the game is very earth-heavy, so I needed an earth youkai of some sort. Her attacks were created after conferring with a friend of mine who was big into geology (liquefaction!).
Mahiru plays the role of Ame-no Uzume-no-mikoto, the goddess who danced to lure Amaterasu out of the cave, hence the dance theme. I honestly can't remember why I made her an ame-onna, but it determined the theme of her rain danmaku.
Emi is very much a product of Houko's design - every endboss needs a right-hand girl, so for a light youkai, why not a mirror? Also, in the myth, the divine mirror Yata-no-Kagami is hung outside the cave during the revelry that lures Amaterasu back to the world.
Houko, in case it wasn't obvious by now, is playing the role of Amaterasu. The entire game concept actually developed from the idea of a Touhou boss with a "light and darkness" visual motif, although the darkness half was dropped. In the original concept for Monochrome Universe, the entire screen would be white, while the lifebars, sprites, and danmaku were all black silhouettes over it, but I couldn't get it to work. Her color scheme is a nod to her role as a sun goddess, her horn is because she's a kirin, and her rainbow orb and rainbow danmaku represent her power over light in all its forms. Her final spell is an obvious tribute to Ikaruga, flagship game of my favorite studio of all time.
Kyokukou, if you're putting the story together, fills in the last role as Susano'o, the prankster who caused an incident by trolling her sister. She's meant to be a bit tomboyish - the name Kyokukou is an old-fashioned but androgynous name, and she's got the vest and the very rough-and-tumble attitude in her dialogue. Her wing design and danmaku patterns are based on the fact that she's playing the role occupied in the original story by a god of storms - which transferred into Touhou Superpowers as control over electromagnetism, which I used to have some fun with sciencey crap for her later spell cards.
There was originally going to be an extra Phantasm boss named
Dojaga, a dragon filling out the mythological set in the role of Yamato-no-orochi, but I decided I'd rather move on to a future project than stretch this one out any further.
What inspires you in spellcard making?
Touched on that a lot in the spiel up there.
Also, do you have any soundtracks/music you listen to while making the game?
These days I mostly listen to the music Joel wrote for the game.
I've got a list of tasks I need to complete before I can release the final game written down. There were 11 when I made it on Wednesday, and it's since grown to 17, but I've completed 8 of them, so 9 to go. If everything goes well, we should be looking at a Monday release.