[Engine] Touhoumon 1.812x Essentials

Welcome back to another round of "Derxwna Makes Games", starring your venerable host and Badman themselves, Derxwna Kapsyla! Except, today we aren't presenting just a game! No, today I bring you the revival of an old project- the Touhoumon Essentials Development Starter Kit- now being officially renamed to Touhoumon Essentials, and referred to shorthand as the DevKit! Now, what is the DevKit you might be wondering? Or what even is Touhoumon? Well, random passer-by, allow me to explain- in song! ...Okay, not really song, but I'll break down in a hopefully easy to digest manner.

Touhoumon, or Touhou Puppet Play (Touhou Ningyougeki) is a ROM hack series of Pokemon Fire Red that originated within the Japanese Touhou community, and was made by Hemoglobin A1c and their team. The games sought to combine the Touhou Project games and setting into the Pokemon franchise. There were there core generations of Touhoumon: 1.02, 1.513, and 1.812. Each of the generations has its own quirks and differences from Pokemon. The current generation, 1.812, is the one most dealt in currently, and is the generation that Touhoumon Essentials is built off of. Touhoumon 1.812 has significant differences from Pokemon (Replacement types, a brand new type interaction table, the Physical/Special Split, and some more misc changes. It's a bit too elaborate to get into here, so I shall provide a link to the English Touhoumon 1.8 wiki at the bottom of this post.

Now, as for the DevKit...


Touhoumon Essentials is a Development Kit that ports over the mechanics of the core Touhoumon 1.812 gameplay and mechanics, as well as some of the derivatives built on it (Touhoumon Purple by Agastya and Touhoumon Unnamed by DoesntKnowHowToPlay), to the RPG Maker XP Engine. Puppet versions of the Touhou characters from Touhou 01: Highly Responsive to Prayers up to Touhou 14.5: Urban Legend in Limbo are present, alongside Pokemon up to Generation IV. I'll get into my reasons why Generation 4 is the last generation present below in an FAQ, but for now let's continue. With the DevKit, you'll be able to make a Touhoumon Fangame without the need for picking up a ROM and hacking it. Provided with the DevKit is a Micro-Game that gives an example of a Touhoumon-built project to give an idea of what can be done with it. It's fairly short, and it loosely ties into my larger Touhoumon project, which'll be getting a reboot of sorts in the future as well.


Now you can't be feasibly expected to download this or even give it a cursory glance without knowing what's in it, right? Touhoumon Essentials does have its own fair share of features and quirks, and you might decide its just right for your own budding project! What's in it? Take a look!

• Pokemon up to and including the Fourth Generation (Bulbasaur and Arceus), as well as stat changes/attacks/abilities up to the Fifth Generation.
• Puppets of Touhou Characters up to and including Touhou 14.5: Urban Legend in Limbo (Reimu to Sumireko), as well as a few custom ones here and there
• Pokemon and Touhoumon are segmented off so that, while they may interact, they don't interfeer with one another. Examples of this are:
• A system that allows you to make your own Custom Vs. Transitions utilizing Common Events! Very easy to understand and is extremely malleable!
• A Passcode System to replace Mystery Gift (as Mystery Gift is currently broken due to having no HTTPS support); Examples of how it work can be seen in Common Events.
• New Touhoumon items added to the Mining minigame! Not a whole lot, but enough to be noteworthy!!!
• Quite a few scripts provided by the community:
• A guarantee that more things are working like they should since the last version of the DevKit released about 5 years ago
• Honestly I'm not sure what else is worth mentioning... All* the Puppets have unique cries? The AI-Exclusive Puppets now have Back Sprites and Shiny Sprites? There's a lot of little things that aren't worth mentioning on an individual basis!

If that's not enough to pique your interest, have some screenshots to go along with the features list! They show off some of the features in action!



Ah, my favorite part of the thread.................. Bugs are ever-present, and I make no assumptions that the DevKit is 100% free of them. I've done my best to squash whatever bug I could find, if I found it. If you happen to notice one, please report them to me, even if you think someone else may have reported it; worst that happens is I tell you it's been fixed or that it's already been reported! Remember: A reported bug eventually gets fixed, an unreported bug stays unnoticed forever.

Tier 3: Serious Game Breaking/Mechanic Altering Bugs
• The Keyboard Mode for naming interfaces is broken for Puppets. Will look into fixing!

Tier 2: In the process of fixing:
• I haven't given a full look-over of the Moves/Abilities to make sure everything is 100% accurate. A few numbers might be off, an effect may be wrong, but on the whole it should be correct. If you notice any wrong, please report it!

Tier 1: Almost unnoticeable:
• please pay no mind to the fact that i havent adjusted map sizes to hide the reflection of the player when you're on the southern edge of a map i'm lazy/forgetful

Tier 0: Outside my domain
• Base Essentials' has a few bugs that are still present in the DevKit. One of these bugs is the Purify Machine for Shadow Pokemon. I've reported the bugs with it, but beyond that it's outside my control.
• Move animations still use the generic Type-animations as part of Essentials. Unless you want to make custom animations for each and every move, this is unlikely to be rectified. I suggest playing with animations disabled.

It's very possible I missed some bugs in this list. If you notice any I forgot, relay them to me and I'll have throw them here and try to fix them if I can!
As always, unless I specifically say otherwise on release, I suggest saving inside a house or a Pokemon Center. Changes have been, and will continue to be, made to outside maps to revise them.


This section is where you can find the current build of the DevKit, as well as any Quick Patches associated with that release. Quick Patches are little releases that fix small bugs that don't warrant a rerelease of the build. Detailed instructions on how to install Quick Patches will be provided alongside the patch itself if applicable.

Current Version: Touhoumon Essentials Version 3.0
Current Quick Patch: None


Over the years a lot of people have helped to make the DevKit be what it is now. While a master list of the credits is included with the download itself, within the spoiler below is also that same list.



You have questions, no doubt. I have answers, I hope! Let's see if we can address any of those questions preemptively, shall we?



If you wish to contact me for any reason regarding the DevKit, you're free to leave a message on this thread, shoot me a PM on here, contact me on the Discord Server, or find me on my various social media hangouts, such as my personal Tumblr account, or my personal Twitter account.

Hopefully there's someone else out there who makes use of this engine. Real hyped.

I would love to see people use the kit! As for myself, I'm planning on putting in some additional touches on The Mansion of Mystery by upgrading the engine it uses, as well as soft rebooting Faith & Prayer Version. There's a few other projects on the back burner, but nothing worth talking about right now tbh.

Oh this is COOL
I have version 1.0 and I was looking to get an update so I can work on my own Silly Touhoumon Games, and stumbled onto this

Is there the Slide Evolution mechanic thing? I'm just curious, doesn't change anything for me either way

Slide Evolution isn't a thing in the engine, but that's easy enough to do by editing the Pokemon.txt file. Lengthy process, but simple!

Ah, thanks for responding! Out of curiosity (because I'm a newbie to working on stuff like this, alas), how would that work? Would it just be wiring them to be allowed to evolve into each other?

In Pokemon.txt, every defined species can have the tag "Evolutions". With this tag, you can determine what a species will evolve into and how. For example, Eevee will an Evolutions tag that looks like this:
For Slide Evolutions, all you would have to do for the Puppets is manually define the Evolutions tag for them, and add in their respective evolutions and methods. For example, Technical Suika's would look like this:
A very simple process! But it will take a significant amount of time to do that for around ~300 Puppets.

Ah, thank you lots for explaining!

Hey there. Great job. But I wanted to ask whether is it allowed to post a free-to-use version of Pokemon Essentials on the forum?

You are certainly right that I did forget about the rules involving Essentials. I've brought it to Marin's attention to see if I need to remove the download link or not. When I get word back, I'll post an update here and take action if need be.

UberDunsparce said:

Hey there. Great job. But I wanted to ask whether is it allowed to post a free-to-use version of Pokemon Essentials on the forum?

Click to expand...

After having talked it over with Marin, and Marin talking it over with the staff...



The DevKit is allowed to be on PokeComm with no alterations! Thank you for pointing this out and allowing me to clarify this, I hadn't even realized it initially so it was good to get the clarification now.

Please, somebody help me. What needs to be done to fix the convoy belts at the gym in Mulberry Village and get to the gym leader? 😢

You can only fix it if you have RPG Maker XP installed, as "fixing" the conveyor belts requires fixing the faulty code there.