Storytime:
Recently I was struck by sudden nostalgia for some old touhou fan games (the ones made in danmakufu in particular) when I first got into touhou and discovered MotK. I remembered stuff like
Luminous Dream and non-touhou ones like
Juuni Jumon, playing them and having fun despite myself being terrible at these kinds of games in general. Young me didn't care, I liked seeing people actually make their own little games and side projects for the things they loved. As much as I wanted to do something myself, I wasn't skilled at the coding behind these kinds of games, but I took some enjoyment in making cute little sprites for people to use since there were a lot of demands for custom bullets and player sprites in other people's scripts and projects
even though I haven't done much in my own thread for quite some time :'DHappy as I was to find that these still exist on the web, it kinda hit me how there's little to no other new projects being worked on around the community now. Or at least it seems that way to me. For example, Luminous Dream's creator had another game in the works,
Tree of Life, which never got finished and remains as a small demo. Juuni Jumon had another game planned,
Juuni Jumon - Cultural Festival, which similarly got cancelled at some point and never finished. Another interesting note was someone who wanted to use my Rin player sprites for their own fangame, and then I came to find out
that game was also cancelled. Lots of other games either remained unfinished, demo only, or canceled altogether; games such as
Promised mystery of moisture,
Unification of the Artful Rain, and Len'en's
Glorious Memory Lane feel like they've completely dropped off the face of the earth.
It just seems like there's barely any being made or worked on now? At most I've seen are
music albums in this thread with ideas for stories and characters, and the last games I remember being finished and talked about highly were
Sapphire Panlogism and
Bubbling Imaginary Treasures (though the latter apparently had some drama that occurred with the creator).
Obviously times change and people have less time or move on with their lives for other things, leaving stuff like this behind for people like me to randomly remember and ramble about out of the blue. But it feels kinda sad to see so very few new things in the current age. It makes me wonder if people are even bothering with making more touhou danmakufu fan games alongside the newer touhou stuff. Unless they're hiding deep with the pits of Discord, where no one without an account and invite is allowed to see them. Which only saddens me more if new stuff is going to continue to remain hidden behind gated communities far from the surface web.
What is happening nowadays? Are such projects a thing of the past, or is there less time/motivation to work on them? What are your thoughts on my weird ramblings about the past?
