Early Danmaku Engine

Note: Posted 2017. Article date is original screenshot date.

Early vertical scrolling sh'mup prototype. This engine would eventually support scripting with Lua, highly customizable and scriptable bullet patterns with an API similar to Danmakufu, and the ability to record, replay, and rewind gameplay state for ultra-fast bullet pattern script iteration.

Gameplay ticks would complete in under 1 millisecond with hundreds of bullets on the screen at once thanks to highly optimized bullet logic and collision detections system.

Each bullet ran a tiny VM that would let it embed complicated behavior such as splitting, firing sub-projectiles, changing direction, changing angular velocity, changing velocity and acceleration, all at frame count intervals.

At some point the gameplay core was made into a library and a UE4 project was started using that library for the fast scripting and collision detection, but it was abandoned for being too much overhead to the design and production pipeline in favor of returning to a 2D engine.