CASCADE - Modfest 31 WINNER

7/15/22 - Cascade has won the Modfest 31 vote! I thank you all for playing!
(All Modfest 31 submissions - Doukutsu Club)



After the disappearance of his sister, a young creature sets off on a journey to find her
There are two endings, Ending A and Ending B, it is up to you to decide which one is better

although this was made for Modfest 31, the original concept was formed during Modfest 30, which is why it is based on the "Cascade" prompt
The mod's gameplay is more platforming focused, with an ability that makes platforming much more interesting in the latter half of the game.

This mod was a week long effort with most of my free time spent working on it, with a bit of procrastination and staying up through a couple long nights touching up aspects of the mod. The mod may be somewhat short, but I hope it's an enjoyable and polished experience in the end.

Spoiler: Screenshots

Download
Doukutsu Club
Itch.io

Original Soundtrack
Soundcloud
Bandcamp
Newgrounds
Spotify

Spoiler: Credits

Clownacy - DLL Mod Loader (ogg music, graphics enhancement)
AsperDev_ - Some Cave Story Beta sprite recreations
Noxid - Booster's Lab, the editor I used
Eli/Uselesscalcium - Playtesting a prerelease build to help me fix some mistakes
Afroscal - Cascade background

All ambient tracks used are created by users on Freesound.org. More information in Readme.txt

 

Cool, nice to see you posting another mod here, I always enjoy playing your mods, and I always like your music. I'm still in the middle of playing ACCS and will probably finish that up this next weekend, but after that, I'll try to set aside some time to play this.

 

All right, double-post since it's been 5 days.

I've gotten around to playing this mod now, and I enjoyed it. It was short, bit it did a really good job of getting me to feel for the characters. The character design was very simple, but cute. The eerie atmosphere fed very well into this mod's dark tone.

The music was also enjoyable. There weren't any memorable melodies, but it still felt like you blended the instruments together in a way that gave the mod character.

Slightly more spoiler-y details:

Spoiler

At first, I went to that broken looking door in the bottom left corner of that village-like room, saw the phantom of his sister, retraced my steps to the beginning to see her ghost again in the bed, and then periodically saw it before finishing the mod. I loaded a previous save file to see if skipping that room would make anything different happen, and the only difference I noticed was that the door to the storage room in one of those last rooms is inaccessible. Not sure if there are any other differences. I was hoping that doing some counter-intuitive path with the phantom would positively impact the ending, but I decided not to invest the necessary time to try all the combinations, and just take you at your word that there's only 2 endings.

Not sure which ending I like better, they're both pretty poignant.

 

All right, double-post since it's been 5 days.

I've gotten around to playing this mod now, and I enjoyed it. It was short, bit it did a really good job of getting me to feel for the characters. The character design was very simple, but cute. The eerie atmosphere fed very well into this mod's dark tone.

(I'd prefer if you put most of this in a spoiler)

Thanks for the feedback, Hayden!

Spoiler

For one, no, the path from the Old Building > Home > Storage Room is the only possible path to find them all, the trigger for the next is only activated once the previous one's flag is set. Finding them all are the requirements for unlocking Ending B, and without finding them all the Cascade Guard has slightly shorter dialogue and forces you into Ending A.
And, "Not sure which ending I like better, they're both pretty poignant."
This is as I expected, neither are really better than the other in my eyes, I intentionally left it so that it is impossible to save your sister, and the endings were more intended to be different, bittersweet outcomes.

Thank you for playing the mod, I'm glad you enjoyed it

 

(I'd prefer if you put most of this in a spoiler)

Done.

Spoiler

For one, no, the path from the Old Building > Home > Storage Room is the only possible path to find them all, the trigger for the next is only activated once the previous one's flag is set. Finding them all are the requirements for unlocking Ending B, and without finding them all the Cascade Guard has slightly shorter dialogue and forces you into Ending A.

Spoiler

Oh, you're right, I guess I didn't notice that when I played through that second time, but indeed I am not presented with that choice to go back home.

 

7/15/22 - after some time, the voting for Modfest 31 concluded...

Spoiler

And with that, Cascade has won the Modfest 31 vote! Thank you all for playing my mod, I'm glad you enjoyed it

Check out the rest of the Modfest 31 submissions at Doukutsu Club!

 

Congratulations on the win, Aqua! It's always nice to see your effort paying off. I totally forgot about that 128 endings mod, don't remember if I even played it, and I didn't even remember that that mod was by TrashBox.

 

As of today, it has been 1 YEAR since the release of Cascade. I was intending on releasing an update today, but due to delays (mostly procrastination) I will be releasing it a bit later. This will fix a few minor mistakes I made when working on it as well as other polishing, extra details, and maybe a bit of extra content?
Additionally, I intend to work on a sort of sequel or spiritual successor of sorts at some point after the anniversary update. Won't give too many details on that yet, but it will likely be much longer and have a different protagonist.

For now, I have recently uploaded the entire soundtrack to Youtube, complete with some neat little visuals, so there's that!