※How to make Touhou derived work - Doujin & ZUN's Touhou guidelines

~Hakurei Shrine~ > Rika and Nitori's Garage Experiments

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Sparen:

--- Quote from: Spacechurro on February 07, 2017, 05:30:08 AM ---I'm not entirely sure if this is the appropriate place to ask this, but it seems about closest than anything else, and I didn't want to make an entire new topic so...

I was wondering if it was discouraged to make a game from Danmakufu that plays the same as Touhou, but contain no Touhou characters, and is just it's own story. Would that be considered stealing a game mechanic, or abusing the program to use to make my own game? No publishing, or payment.

Also, this is more of a personal question, but using my own characters wouldn't make everyone hate it, or angry, right?

I'm having a hard time explaining my question, so I hope you guys understand it.

--- End quote ---

Danmakufu's license states the following:

--- Code: ---Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
met:

* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above
copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided
with the distribution.
* Neither the name of the Hiroshima University nor the names of
its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
derived from this software without specific prior written
permission.
--- End code ---

You can basically use Danmakufu for anything as long as you include the DNH license.

The shmup is a genre, so as long as you don't contain ANY Touhou characters and do not use ANY of ZUN's resources, you're in the clear. Refer to Len'en as a successful example.

If you do make a Danmaku game without any connection to Touhou, be prepared to not face hate or anger but rather ignorance. You're going to have to put effort into marketing your game if you want people to play it. For me at least, I've been working on a danmaku game for two years and I can count the number of people willing to playtest the game with the fingers on my hands.

Spacechurro:
Thank you so much!

james7132:
I know of Bandcamp as a potential grey area when it comes to distribution, with it's Pay What you Want payment scheme and sub-website (platform acts as host to each user's personal mini-website) layout. This brings into question whether it is a questionable "OK" to distribute Touhou fangames on sites like https://itch.io, which have similar setup of personalized sub-website and pay what you want. Is it?

Drake:
The fact that it's still definitely geared towards promotion within the site itself through stuff like browsing/searching and popularity/ratings, makes it definitely more dangerous than bandcamp. Are there even good examples of other such derivative works being on itch? I've never really seen any. Ultimately I think ZUN would parade something like itch for indie development, but that isn't really the issue.

One of the dangers I think exists with any kind of platform used to start uploading/selling Touhou derivative works, and I'm sure this was also part of why the derivative guidelines are worded as such, is that once something is seen as a precedent, anything becomes fair game. If it becomes seen as legitimate and works start popping up everywhere, the isolation factor begins to unravel. It's also quite difficult to moderate any system that isn't closely tied to the doujin scene (heck, look at the total lack of moderation over Steam despite it being disallowed and often being stolen content). This isn't a problem with many similar japanese sites due to the ecosystem but I don't really know how it would be feasible to cross that gap from the western side. It's a tough question.

Selling on something like DLsite is like a working option, legitimacy-wise. They are explicitly a doujin shop with a non-trivial amount of Touhou works, with some big names to its credit, and there is official english support including for creators. That being said their tools are definitely not as amazing as itch, and I don't think there is PWYW or anything like that, so if the goal is to be able to capitalize on features like that it obviously doesn't work. But it is an actual option for digital distribution and sales.

james7132:

--- Quote from: Drake on July 26, 2017, 10:27:48 AM ---The fact that it's still definitely geared towards promotion within the site itself through stuff like browsing/searching and popularity/ratings, makes it definitely more dangerous than bandcamp. Are there even good examples of other such derivative works being on itch? I've never really seen any. Ultimately I think ZUN would parade something like itch for indie development, but that isn't really the issue.

--- End quote ---

Bandcamp definitely has the aforementioned search and ratings (as a function of recent download/purchase rate), so I would argue that it isn't exactly all that much different. It is true that there is no major precedent for Touhou derivative works being distributed via the platform. I'll definitely take a look at what's needed to put something on DLsite, didn't know they had self-publishing tools.

Another question regarding this, where does Patreon stand in all of this? A lot of doujin creators use it from minusT to LunarSpotlightMedia of Gensokyo Radio to the plethora of artists that draw Touhou. Arguably, it avoids the crowdfunding/donation issue by taking it as a donation directly to the creator rather than donating towards the explicit end-product. Giving perks/exclusive content is also pretty common case there. It may not be directly crowdfunding, but it shares a lot of similarities with it. Admittedly many people who have them do not exclusively create Touhou content, but, in some cases like minusT, it's pretty darn apparent that their sole focus is to create Touhou doujin content.

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