Taisei Project is an open source fan-game set in the world of Tōhō Project. It is a top-down vertical-scrolling curtain fire shooting game (STG), also known as a "bullet hell" or "danmaku." STGs are fast-paced games focused around pattern recognition and mastery through practice.
Taisei Project is highly portable, and is written in C11, using SDL2 with an OpenGL renderer. It is officially supported on Windows, Linux, macOS, and through WebGL-enabled browsers such as Firefox and Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, etc). It can also be compiled for a number of other operating systems.
For gameplay screenshots, see our website.
For gameplay instructions, read this.
For the story, read this. (Spoiler warning!)
Tōhō Project is an indie game series (also known as "doujin" in Japanese) known for its ensemble cast of characters and memorable soundtracks. It is produced by and large by a single artist known as ZUN, and has a permissive license which allows for indie derivative works such as Taisei Project to legally exist.
Taisei is not a "clone" of Tōhō, and tells an original story with its own music, art, gameplay mechanics, and codebase. While some familiarity with Tōhō is helpful, the gameplay can be enjoyed on its own without prior knowledge of the series.
For more information on dōjin culture, click here.
You can find precompiled binaries of the complete game on the Releases page on GitHub, available for Windows (x86/x64), Linux, and macOS.
An experimental build for Nintendo Switch (homebrew) also exists (use at your own risk).
You can also play our experimental WebGL build through your web browser here. (Chromium-based browsers and Firefox supported.)
We recommend fetching the source code using git:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/taisei-project/taiseiYou should also run git submodule update whenever you pull in new code, checkout another branch, or perform any git actions. The ./pull and ./checkout helper scripts can do that for you automatically.
Download ZIP link on the main repo does not work.
This is due to the fact that GitHub does not package submodules alongside source code when it automatically generates .zip files. We've instead created those archives manually, and you MUST download the archive from the Releases page.
Currently, we recommend building Taisei on a POSIX-like system (Linux, macOS, etc).
While Taisei is highly configurable, the easiest way to compile the code for your host machine is:
meson setup build/
meson compile -C build/
meson install -C build/See the Building doc for more information on how to build Taisei, and its list of dependencies.
Taisei stores all data in a platform-specific directory:
- On Windows, this will probably be
%APPDATA%\taisei - On macOS, it's
$HOME/Library/Application Support/taisei - On Linux, *BSD, and most other Unix-like systems, it's
$XDG_DATA_HOME/taiseior$HOME/.local/share/taisei
This is referred to as the Storage Directory. You can set the environment variable TAISEI_STORAGE_PATH to override this behaviour.
Documentation for many topics, including development and game controller support, can be found in our docs section.
Feel free to open up an issue if you run into any issues with compiling or running Taisei.
