Sting Curtain
The score is how far up the curtain you got.
Touhou Project is where bullet hell got its shape. The screen fills with hundreds of bullets, and it is passable because the part of you that can actually be hit is a few pixels in the middle of your sprite — so the curtain is not an obstacle course, it is a pattern with gaps designed into it, and the game is reading those gaps four volleys ahead. The series has been going since 1996 and the whole genre is still standing in its footprints.
This is that shape, one screen and one sitting. It is an homage and it says so. Nothing is lifted — every pattern, boss, sprite and noise here was written from scratch, the bosses are wasps because this site is about bees, and it is not connected to that series or its author in any way.
Arrows or WASD to fly · Z or Space holds fire · Shift focuses — half speed, a tighter shot, and it draws the one dot on you that can actually be hit · X bombs: the field clears, you are briefly untouchable, and the card you were on can no longer be captured · P pause · M sound, which mutes the record too · on a phone, drag anywhere in the field — the bee flies above your thumb and fires by itself, and tapping the panel bombs
- Your hitbox two and a half pixels, drawn only while you focus — the rest of the bee is scenery
- Graze ring a bullet that passes inside it pays, once, and feeds the bomb meter
- Bloom ringed bullets stop where they are and burst — watch where, not what
- Power off killed wasps; it widens the shot, and a death costs you two
- Points worth more the higher up the field you take them
Only a little of you can be hit#
The bee is fourteen pixels across and two and a half of them are lethal. That one number is what the entire genre is built on, and nothing here works without it: four hundred bullets fit on a field this size because the part of you they have to touch is smaller than the gaps between them.
- Hold `Shift` and you can see it. Focusing draws the hitbox as a single dot with a ring around it, halves your speed, and pulls your shot into a column. That trade is live on every frame — fast enough to cross the field, or slow enough to thread it — and it is the only precision control in the game.
- Unfocused, the dot is hidden. You are moving at full speed and you do not get to know exactly where you are. That is the price of the speed, not an oversight.
- Nothing here is a hitscan or a surprise. Every bullet is on the screen for at least half a second before it reaches you, at a speed you can read off its size. A pattern that killed on a frame nobody could have played differently would be a coin toss, and there are none of those in this cabinet.
Grazing is the whole score#
A bullet that passes within twenty-two pixels without touching you pays — once each, so the curtain has to keep arriving. Surviving pays nothing at all.
That is deliberate and it is the genre's oldest instruction: go and stand next to the bullets. A run that hides in the bottom corner and waits out every clock reaches stage two with a four-figure score, because a card that times out is worth a fifth of one you actually beat. Grazing also fills the bomb meter, which is the cabinet paying you back for the risk that earned it.
Spell cards#
A wasp fights in named phases. Each one is a pattern, a health bar and a clock, and the clock is a promise: every card ends whether you beat it or not, so no fight on this cabinet can turn into one neither side can win.
Capturing a card means emptying its health before the clock runs out without being hit and without bombing. That is what the score is actually made of — and it is why power matters, because a card's health is written against a bee that has collected some. At power one the same card simply runs its clock out and lets you past, which is the intended answer to having died: you get through it, you do not get paid for it.
Paper Sentry
One ring at a time, wide enough to walk through standing up. It is here to teach the thing the rest of the game assumes: the bullets are aimed at where you are not, and the way through a ring is to already be moving.
Mud Dauber
A fan that sweeps across the field, and walls with a gap that walks. The safe place is behind the sweep, always, and the mistake everybody makes is running ahead of it.
Yellowjacket Chorus
Two spirals turning against each other, which make a lattice with moving holes rather than a wall — read by standing still and letting it come, which is the opposite of everything before it.
Bald-Faced Queen
Twenty-eight bullet rings with one bullet missing, and the missing one moves. Denser than anything before it and easier than what follows, because density is not difficulty.
Hornet Sovereign
Three spirals and a sweep at once, turning at rates that do not divide into each other — so the lattice never repeats and never closes.
Past the last wasp the list starts again, harder. The bullets get faster on each lap and the clocks do not, which is the genre's own second loop: strictly less time to do strictly more work in.
Bombs, lives, and power#
- Two bombs. `X` clears the field into point items, makes you briefly untouchable, and hurts whatever you were fighting. It is the admission that a pattern can be unfair this once without the run being over — which is what lets the patterns be as dense as they are. It also costs you the capture.
- Three lives. A death clears the screen, scatters two levels of power on the floor for you to go back and get, and leaves you one bomb.
- Power comes off killed wasps, every other one, and widens your shot from two bullets to five. It is not a bonus; it is the difference between capturing a card and watching its clock run out.
- Point items are worth more the higher up the field you take them, and flying into the top quarter pulls every one of them to you at once. Another instruction, and the same one: the boss is up there.
What it is played to#
Under the glass is a shelf of nine phonk records, and one of them is already picked. Press Start and it goes on; press another row and it swaps where it stands, mid-run or not. The cabinet's own chiptune loop is still down there as the last row, and it is what you get if a record will not play.
The choice is there because a danmaku run is eight unbroken minutes of reading a pattern, and thirty-two steps of square wave is not eight minutes of anything. Nothing is sent to YouTube until a record actually goes on, the player is silent and has no controls of its own, and `M` mutes it along with everything else the cabinet makes.
Posting a run#
Sign in with Discord and the run posts itself when the last life goes; play as a guest and it is kept as a personal best on this device instead. The board ranks on score and shows the stage you died on beside it. The arcade page has the longer version of how the boards work, and the other cabinets.