Touhou... for DS!
http://www.weeaboo.nl/index.php?cat=8Made by anoNL
Ahem. Anyways it seems you can make your own games with this.
The manual can be found here:
http://www.weeaboo.nl/article/thds/manual-0.8/Might be a bit pointless if you don't have a DS + flashcard, but I'm sure some people here do have those things.
First impressions on the gameplay. Control-wise it feels fine to me, it allows you to set your own controls and you only need 3 buttons so it's not hard to get a comfortable configuration. Play the demo a few times was pretty fun. The main issues are the split screen of the DS, and how dying works.
There doesn't seem to be a "blind spot" between the two screens. However it doesn't feel awkward when you try to dodge something while between the two screens. The angles of bullets seems to get changed a bit or something, I'm not quite sure. It a bit like looking through water. Alse fast bullets are hard to see coming since you can't precicely judge angles when bullets are on the top of the screen and the bottom screen isn't very big and doesn't give much time to react.
That said, I think this problem can be remedied by a bit of creative design when making patterns that work around this hinderance.
The bigger problem actually is how dying works. When you get hit, you mearly flash and lose one life. If you hit bomb too late, then you end up losing a life AND a bomb. There actually IS deathbomb implemented, however if you miss this window then you face the mentioned concequences. Not only that, but if you do get off the deathbomb, you lose two bombs ala IN, which is pretty stupid since it's completely different from IN in that IN practically pauses the game when you get hit while you barely even notice when you get hit in this game.
There might be a working for this if you play with the character scripts for a bit but the current implemented characters are messed up like this.
Other than those issues it's actually quite fun. The controls feel fine and have good control (maybe not if you have a DS lite though), the sound and graphics are pretty good (okay they're stolen from ZUN but the point is the DS doesn't mess them up to much), and most of all I think it has some potential. Of course wether or not it really has potential depends more on the code itself so now I'll move onto that.
Since the majority of this board is devoted to danmakufu, I'll mostly be comparing thDS to danmakufu. The language seems very simple compared to danmakufu. As in like, very simple.
Going by the manual, it seems (keep in mind I'm not a very experienced programmer so I could be wrong on some aspects) all you do is define a bunch of objects and toss them around. You can define something to be one of three things in this game. A spell, an object, or a boss. Enemies and bullets both count as objects. Essentially you have to define each bullet you make with this program, which seems kinda tedious compared to danmakufu. So if you want to make a single shot, you have to define an object, and then give it a bunch of commands. Then you can fire that bullet at any time you want. There MIGHT be a way to loop (I know there is a _loop function but I don;t know how much it can do) so that you can create patterns easily. I'm not sure since I haven't played around with it yet. I advise looking through the manual and function lists to get a better idea how it works.
On non-gameplay aspects, it supports a variety of things such as multiple stages, alternate paths, talking cutscenes etc. These things are all relatively simple to implement, however the image type they use is a bit odd and I don't know much about it (.dta). Creating caharacters is significantly easier than danmakufu since all you have to do basically is set some stats and make some images that are the right size. Of course the downside of this is you probably can't create really unique characters (but hey no one likes those anyways right? :V)
Oh yea one last issue. There IS some slowdown when there are too many bullets on the screen. I think DS lite has a slighty better processer and maybe won't lag as much, but there is one attack in the demo that fills the screen with bullets and lags my DS. Nothing else lagged though.
Since I have a DS and the language seems easier to work with than danmakufu, I be messing around with it a bit. Also, If anyone else wants to try coding stuff but doesn't have a DS or flashcard I could test stuff for you :V.
