News

Taisei v1.3 Released! 2019-04-27 12:00

After quite some time we are back with another release! The list of changes is a bit more subtle than in the last releases. The short story of it is that with deep-reaching engine optimizations we were able to get better performance… which we used to make the game look significantly better in many places. You can now enjoy high resolution graphics and about an infinite amount of particles spraying around.

The new graphics backend is maybe almost too flexible. Akari was able to whip up an (emscripten-powered) browser version of Taisei in a bunch of days. This is still experimental, but you can try to play it on the web now like it’s really 2019!

But of course we also have some gameplay changes for you!

Here is a very coarse list of notable changes:

  • Greatly improved Graphics. Name one thing you knew in Taisei and chances are, it looks much better now compared to v1.2. In case we made your intel laptop blush (or get a fever), find the new quality settings in the options.

  • Reimu is now finally investigating this incident. Fans will be able to use her traditional homing shot and blasting orb bomb. Moreover, her second shot will have you bend space to reach all the places elusive to the regular household shots. But let’s face the real reason she’s in the game: Developer favoritism.

  • Scoring Systems are a staple in danmaku games and now Taisei too has a nontrivial mechanic that transforms the way you route your stages. You can activate Power Surges that reward you in points and resources which makes this feature fun for both skilled scorers and the average Yōkai. The spells formerly known as Extra Spells are now Voltage Overdrives and are unlocked using the surges.

  • New MarisaB. Marisa always had a rather slow second shotmode which got replaced by her new Stellar Vortex. This is still an inverted focus, but releases a whole storm of bullets that will flush those fairies off the screen.

  • Music Room. Unlock and listen to every piece of our cool soundtrack. There are two bonus tracks that are unlocked under special circumstances. Can you find them?

  • Bombs are now more unique and require different strategies to maximize their damage.

  • Modified Collision Formulas. Oh well we had some bugs in the old ones and never realized… :'))) But this change is probably less noticeable to most players.

  • Pattern changes. We did not touch the bullets much, but in a few select places we improved patterns slightly.

As always it is difficult to put over a year of development in such a short list especially since most of the work this time was behind the scenes. In lines of code we had around 57000 insertions and 20000 deletions since v1.2 which is quite the magnitude for a small project like ours. It's a little sad that we don't get to brag about all the internal engine changes in excruciating detail, but such is life … ;)

Special Thanks this time go to Akari whose hard work and creativity made 95% of this release. We would also like to thank our testers which were more than essential in the making of the scoring system and performance testing on all kinds of different hardware. Thanks to the all people who contributed over the last year, those who left the team and those who joined. And last but not least to you there following the Taisei news after all this time.

Now head to the Download section and have fun with the game while we start planning the next release! If you find any issues (or are generally interested) join our Discord server or IRC channel.