12 Hour Challenge - Double Spoiler

Q: What is the 12 hour challenge?
A: The 12 hour challenge is Golden's community event with one simple goal: learn and complete a speedrun of a game you've never done before within 12 hours. There's no official rules beyond that--everything is up to interpretation.

Q: What is Double Spoiler?
A: Double Spoiler is a "danmaku photography" game and the "12.5th" game in the Touhou series. If you're not very familiar with Touhou, then the previous sentence probably sounds like an esoteric mess. Basically the title is an offshoot from the main series (thus the decimal point), and is the spiritual successor to Shoot the Bullet, the first Touhou photography game.

Q: How is Double Spoiler played?
A: Unlike typical shoot 'em ups (shmups), Double Spoiler isn't an autoscrolling game in which you go through a series of stages and their respective bosses. Instead, the game is divided into a set of levels and each level has a number of scenes within it (e.g. 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, etc). In every scene you fight a boss, and to defeat them you have to take a scene-specific number of photographs of the boss. Photographs can only be taken when your camera is fully charged (you can expedite charges by sacrificing your maneuverability), you can swap between portrait and landscape orientations, take pictures from a distance at the cost of picture size, and any projectiles caught in a photo immediately disappear.

Taking a single hit results in a death and scenes have no checkpoints, so deaths can be quite costly. Thankfully as with other games in the genre, your hitbox is fairly small (indicated by the white dot only visible when using "focus" movement), and many projectiles tend to have hitboxes smaller than their sprites.

Q: Have you ever played Double Spoiler before?
A: Yes, when the game first came out back in 2010. I played enough scenes to unlock Extra, then cleared all of the Extra scenes. That was where I stopped. I have a decent amount of experience with the Touhou series too, so while I believe this challenge will be a bit difficult to tackle, I'm going in with some confidence.

Q: How is any% defined?
A: The any% definition for Double Spoiler is a bit loose, but is more or less treated as unlocking Hatate. To unlock Hatate you need to clear all scenes from the spoiler level, and unlocking spoiler involves: (1) clearing at least one scene from each of levels 1-12, (2) clearing 3 scenes from extra, and (3) clearing 58 scenes in total. Doing so brings you to a congratulations screen, and it's this screen that allows "unlock Hatate" to be interpreted as beating the game.

Q: Why Double Spoiler?
A: I have so many answers to this:
1. I've honestly had my eyes on running either Double Spoiler or Shoot the Bullet for several years now. I played a fair amount of Touhou several years ago so hey, why not try a speedrun.
2. I've always wanted to run a Touhou game of some sort, main series or fangame.
3. Running a Touhou game is a convenient fusion of two things I really enjoy: Touhou and speedrunning. By doing an official Touhou game, I also see it as a way of bringing some permanence to the time I've spent with the series... having it all culminate into a speedrun if you will.
4. I like variety. One of my many goals in speedrunning since the start has actually been having a varied set of runs. While I'm probably best thought of as Mega Man runner, I'd like to transcend that image. I don't even want to be pigeonholed into platformers.
5. I'm actually fairly interested in the 100% category for this game so this is a great way to test the waters. If that doesn't work, maybe I'll still enjoy any% enough to keep running it.
6. Touhou 2016

Q: Where can I find more people doing the 12 hour challenge?
A: Click the "12 Hour Challenge" button here: http://www.speedrunslive.com/