My bullet hell — A guide to Danmaku Unlimited 3

Sunny Tam is based out of Toronto, Canada. But his games have a fever dream intensity more attuned to the neon lit streets of Tokyo. Since 2009 he’s been raining bullet hell on a small but dedicated fan base with his Danmaku Unlimited series.

What began as a bedroom project has since become a full-time a job, and the release of Danmaku Unlimited 3 on the Nintendo Switch has introduced his take on the bullet hell genre to much broader audience.

We asked him to break down the three key components of a successful shooter — the bullets, the level design, and the art of actually selling it.

Bullet Pattern

I tend to stay away from random patterns, so even the more random looking patterns are scripted. These follow the Touhou style of alternating between light and heavy phases. The light phase usually follows a certain theme/pattern and varies in increasing difficulty as the fight goes on. Since the heavy phases are often very claustrophobic, the light phases tend to get the player to move around more and in general offers a bit of respite until the next heavy phase.

The “Heavy” phases are pretty important, as they are the “meat” of Touhou style games, they need to look cool and also provide a challenge. I tend to either have an idea about a cool looking pattern and design up the difficulty around it, or I want to challenge the player in a certain way, and in that case I’ll focus on the mechanics first and then build the visual flair out from that.

Level Design

Shoot’em ups, traditional bullet hell in particular, have pretty set conventions when it comes to level design. Danmaku Unlimited follows the Cave style so that means stage — midboss — stage — boss. The middle stages can be pretty flexible, while the first stage tends to be the toughest to design as it needs to simultaneously draw the player in visually, presents the mechanics and provide enough excitement without becoming too difficult.

Business strategy

It wasn’t until Danmaku Unlimited 2 became available cross-platform did I start making enough to justify working on it full-time. Having the game on multiple platforms helps in broadening the market and softens the blow when a platform don’t perform as expected (Steam is kind of a disaster right now for niche games).

I was pretty lucky being able to bring the game to the Switch because while Steam accounted for the bulk of DU2’s sales the same could not be said now and without the strong Switch sales I probably would have had to consider getting a regular job and putting indie development on hiatus. If you make games in more popular genre you can probably still find traction and gain an audience via Steam but I think for niches like STG it is going to be pretty difficult to get noticed if Steam is your only platform. In terms of breakdown it is pretty close to 60/40 between the Switch and the rest of the platforms combined (PC/iOS/Android)

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