CS community meta discussion

I never joined the discord server, nor do i recall any dramas, what is going on? this appeared on my email inbox and im very confused . . .

 

I never joined the discord server, nor do i recall any dramas, what is going on? this appeared on my email inbox and im very confused . . .

Well the whole "Jade has a manic episode" part aside it's mostly just a broad strokes discussion thread about the community
A lot of this after the unnecessary arguing is mostly just brainstorming and trying to figure out ways the community could be made more lively, i.e reaching out to streamers, making it easier to get into modding, and other ways of refining the forum. It also inspired Serena to make that thread about the new forum themes, and some other adjacent activity.
The underpinning question through all of this has been "It's slightly annoying to get into CS because the community is fractured and Nicalis is not invested in maintaining the community because they've historically just left the forums to be the aggregator of CS fan opinions and CS+ programmers / musicians

 

this appeared on my email inbox and im very confused . . .

Not entirely sure how this could happen, either someone has emailed it to you or the Watch button was accidentally pressed at one point.

 

I think it's because of the new 'Trending Content' feature that got added to the forums, or something adjacent to that.

Maybe andwhy is cooking?

 

From the launcher you'd be able to click on the mods displayed and install them. The launcher keeps the client-side download percentage updating, downloads the file from the doukutsu club server, then unpacks it into the user's preferred install directory for the given mod (which would probably default to a generic mod install directory)

I hope this isn't considered an unwanted bump (I also got the email), but:

As someone who has casually enjoyed Cave Story mods in the past, a mod launcher, even a buggy minimal one, would be really appreciated.

Edit: before I talk more about that, I thought I ought to mention that the modding wiki almost certainly qualifies for Indie Wiki Buddy which will automatically redirect any user of the extension away from the old Fandom wiki to the new(er) independent one. There's a form on their home page for the purpose of requesting that a redirect be added.

As for my old mod installation method:
In the past, I managed mods by finding the file, downloading the zip to my downloads folder, extracting the zip while trying to ensure I don't end up with Downloads\doconfig.exe by mucking up folders during extraction. Then mucking about with profile files, if I was upgrading the mod, occasionally losing progress by doing the transfer backwards and overwriting the wrong file (modern windows file explorer makes such tasks so tedious I rush them).

Even though I could have a folder specially for cave story mods, in practice I'd let things pile up in my downloads folder, and then sometimes rely on bookmarks or sifting through search results () to find the zip online again when returning to the playthrough after a break, only to find I already had the files needed.

All this is the sort of thing that nowerdays I'd probably want to try automating somehow, either by using a pre-existing tool built by the community (e.g. Everest/Olympus Celeste), misusing an existing tool, or mangling HTML with Python (if I was feeling very confident/bored).

 

@Mint the dark forces that operate the Cave Story Tribute Site Forums Algorithm Email are demanding a better launcher... Also sorry in advance if Serena gets annoying in your dms about homestuck

 

@Mint the dark forces that operate the Cave Story Tribute Site Forums Algorithm Email are demanding a better launcher...

I don't know what you are talking about but I currently have no plans for the launcher at this moment.

 

I interpreted the "dark forces" thing as a joke, but I just want to clarify:
I don't expect anyone to work on the launcher or intended to pressure volunteers in any way.

I was responding to the part of the discussion a while back where there was a disagreement as to whether anyone (specifically more casual players/inexperinced mod users) might find a launcher useful and why.

 

Don't worry about it, Mint's gonna be busy all month anyway, perhaps with a final fantasy, of the 16th variant? ;D Also Visions of Mana and Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Let the silly dork play her games X3

 

(It was a joke just so we're all on the same page)

The future of Cave Story's gotta wait I've got to play another final fantasy game because I haven't played enough of them obviously.

The most that could be done in the meantime is just saying "Yeah I wanna see this happen" and maybe brainstorming shit about it but all the brainstorming in the world won't really solve the whole "There's nobody that actively wants to work on the program" problem but idk I've seen some random threads here get necro'd lol.

Though for what it's worth, it's still helpful to really put your thoughts out there on what your idealized "Cave Story Mod Launcher" would be even if it just gets put on the backburner for who knows how long.
I for one think it would be pretty sweet if I could just click a button and it would download and launch a cave story mod and I could easily access it from that same program again, it's convenient and it could also maybe make waffles for me too.

 

Don't worry about it, Mint's gonna be busy all month anyway, perhaps with a final fantasy, of the 16th variant? ;D Also Visions of Mana and Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Let the silly dork play her games X3

I haven't even picked up visions yet because I got blindsided by Castlevania and had a friend lend their copy of Pokémon XD so I've been doing gen 3 grinding as well whilst resisting the urge to replay moon and balancing that with work and my weekly stream, give me a break.

If I were to get back to working on the launcher I'd want to make the code less bad first either way and I would first need the creative energy/time/drive to do all that.
One thought i had was to just allow drag and drop with mod zips to instantly add them to your mod folder and add it to the list though to make unzipping/moving a lot more convinient (by essentially automating it).

 

wait why dont people just start bugging simpleflips to play cave story

 

wait why dont people just start bugging simpleflips to play cave story

Why would someone do that?

 

Community's got a severe lack of streamers, vtubers, etc. interacting with the game and its mods. Vinesauce WAS good for maintaining the relevance of the brand in the mainstream for the older era. But Simpleflips has much more active appeal among the mainstream Nintendo fandoms that Cave Story was historically associated with, whereas Vinny has started to evolve into more of an alt culture subniche as Millenials are now going off and moving into jobs in the Military Industrial Complex, psychology, or sciences, becoming federal workers, or public service workers in general, which forces them into different specialized lifestyles (i.e consumption habits, exercise, medication, types of entertainment) that push them into slightly different algorithmic niches.

Since the community's origins the inner workings of the subcultures that helped create it have become much more well explored through various works created based on the happenings of this community (There's a lot of them, but you'll never really know which ones are relevant at any moment. In general maintaining "Historical events" in the form of game dialogue that goes completely undocumented creates layers of obfuscation that make investigating into cases of actual significant importance to people for mental health reasons, etc)
Had there been active maintenence of dialogue dumps, etc. there would be a lot less reason for the modding community to be as isolated as it is from certain internet subcultures. Traumas are a permanent aspect of the algorithms that funnel most people throughout social media, and as a result, iconography, words, spellings, etc. are all made into barriers from one community to another by youtube, twitter, etc.

Cave Story seemed to be designed very well with this 'Game Theory' approach in advance, but certain fans that interpreted it as a call to action inevitably started upon paths that would inflict trauma onto younger members of the community that were very easily misled because of developmental disorders & shitty american education (it's me you bitches)

With the types of events that recur in the community generationally, the "Nonvoilent" or "Normal" options are never properly communicated to any given person, and there's certain communities & subcultures that attract (neurotypicals) due to how they CARRY THEMSELVES and where they set their boundaries. But people like SMG4, Vinesauce, Simpleflips, Tyrone Rodriguez, Sebastian Wolff, etc. are very good examples of where mainstream companies are willing to meet the "Alt culture internet" in the middle in their humor, etc. at the cost of damaging a brand's "brand value", it inadvertently causes a massive influx of new types of people to allow the audience to expand and naturalize to the new net at a time when a massive shift in "web infrastructure" is happening to some degree or another as companies make notable UX, Algorithmic, and Marketing Strategy changes.
Ofc there are people who are extremely adverse to that sanitization, but for the most part they willingly isolated themselves out of an understanding of the boundaries their individual works, etc. have the potential to cause to any given company's operating parameters.
CS community has thankfully expanded into a very free flowing "Keep posting among us" type place as a consequence of certain early tensions going completely unresolved for interested parties (Kate you shouldn't be reading this thread if you haven't finished things yet)
The internet ecosystem has made itself pretty apparent where certain fandoms lie with regards to the reemerging NEET trans, plural, anarchist, ancap, etc. communities as a direct consequence of a certain man's political campaign and the dominos that started falling as a result of that.

 

Then just go toss collections at streamers so they can play like 5 minutes of it before moving to the next or go start streaming yourself instead.

 

Hey we should bother [insert streamer here] to play Cave Story! That should totally work!

Really tho, I think you'll need to be involved in the streamers' own communities before even considering requesting them to play Cave Story. And knowing it's, you know, you, meaning you'd rather have everyone else do it than yourself, then please cease from the idea. Become the change you want to see, and frankly, from your more recent activity, I think you need change more than this community does.

 

Which streamer would even play cave story? I think nowadays cave story is kinda like a cult game and wouldn't gather much attention.

 

Vtubers are popular with the suspiciously wealthy and are suffering a lot from idol culture adversely affecting just about anyone that enters the industry. There's banks tryna pump and dump that entire sphere rn from what I can tell.
Game modders are popular among weird children.
Game speedrunners are popular among cool children.
Game streamers are popular among people with no definable personalities of their own.
Guys that talk loud and confident are popular among cis gay guys and straight girls.
Video essayists are popular among service workers.
Practical advice & life hacks are popular among asocial people. (Typically minorities in their given area or in their digital spaces)

Music theorists & Game designers all know about Cave Story in large degree because of its distinctive soundtrack and easy to recognize iconography that pulls the soundtrack, visuals, etc. together, also because as a musically-centric and game-centric game people had to spend a lot of time Pondering about the implications of it, as they really had nothing better to hyperfixate on!! Cave Story is peak (though excessively violent for no reason)
Word spread very fast about Pixel's works and he had a lot of connections in the early doujin software scene, he gained a large reputation and I imagine the sheer amount of pressure to perform it put on him is why he's been so hesitant to make games these days because he probably wants to explore really niche and weird stuff that he's worried would completely tank his brand reputation given the weird legal predicaments he's in. He's one of those types that seems to be very good at communicating to people far outside of his known spheres of influence, but his biases do show in who he chooses to associate, all of ours do really, and it's fine.
Though a lot of people, machines, animals, WHATEVER, have spent their time trying to fight their inner biases in several senses of the word, but the media landscape is very good at putting out noise that leaves people in certain media ecosystems unable to communicate with other people like them as the result of previous generations' biases.

Mind you, biases are heavily influenced by traumas, etc. so people end up specializing into extremely specific MOs to either mask an aspect of themselves they want to repress or because their subconscious is completely shortcutting the process in their thought patterns that might end up re-traumatizing them.

People can be retraumatized extremely easily, and these days it's only through trial and error that GROUPS of people have to study people with more complex traumatic origins, as people raised in specific environments (i.e amount of care they have access to, time management, agency, etc.) may behave drastically differently if moved into a different environment that actively works against their "default" behaviors. Which are all mostly determined by genetics and structural mimetics (reproducing themselves in various other systems of nature) as far as we know.

 

feel free to write me off jumping into this thread out of nowhere, I just saw it was recently interacted with. That said, I feel as someone who actively loves to make content for the game, I'm genuinely interested and will bite. I also really can't help but wonder. . .what this listed for? Is this in response to DogeDev on WHO would even play Cave Story and what groups they attract? If so, I feel like listing some potential newcomers as weird children, people with no personalities of their own, and asocial seems kinda off. Just seems really blunt, haha.

Vtubers are popular with the suspiciously wealthy and are suffering a lot from idol culture adversely affecting just about anyone that enters the industry. There's banks tryna pump and dump that entire sphere rn from what I can tell.
Game modders are popular among weird children.
Game speedrunners are popular among cool children.
Game streamers are popular among people with no definable personalities of their own.
Guys that talk loud and confident are popular among cis gay guys and straight girls.
Video essayists are popular among service workers.
Practical advice & life hacks are popular among asocial people. (Typically minorities in their given area or in their digital spaces)

Outside of this and getting back to the general idea of ways to get Cave Story back into the spotlight, I really don't know what else can be done outside of what the community is already doing? The game is super niche in the modern day and we're at a point where Nicalis won't do anything with it. I'm fairly certain all the projects they've shown off with no follow up are DEAD and without any kind of continuous content, what's there to push or discuss about. I feel like everything that could be discussed or discovered has been and all that we can do is push forward with our incredibly niche (yet GREAT) personal projects, like the modding scene and artists already do.

The game has been remade, modernized, recomposed, transformed, disected, ENTIRELY by fans and has reached a point where it's impact has already reached the common, every day gamer, even if they don't realize it. The best thing I personally feel the game can go through is general appreciation it until Nintendo releases a new system for Nicalis to make new port for until the end of time. Everything else, we're already currently doing or have done.

 

The reason it's niche is because as far as the public is aware there's no meaningful effort being made to revive the brand, no announcements have been made as to what their official stance on a sequel is in the current era but there's always unverifiable hearsay of hirings and never any meaningful title releases or ports on new platforms, at the moment the community appears to be struggling to maintain relevance in less gentrified areas as a result of how gaming culture tends to skew heavily towards Sony (and if you're really unlucky, Microsoft) if you're in a low-income household and inherit / share another person's console (i.e a previous generation console, or a modern console that happens to Not Be A Nintendo Console because for some reason old unimaginative guys only like realistic looking games). Does NICALiS have a specific obligation to Nintendo, is it being subcontracted out and is this not being disclosed? Or is there a specific geopolitical, etc. decision being made to isolate the community as far as possible from the spheres of influence of said companies?

Cave Story reliably has brand appeal among many different audiences if its presented slightly differently, hence the large booms in popularity when CS3D launched as there was a much more "Dramatic" on the ground marketing campaign in comparison to the milquetoast physical release of CS Switch, while the package quality changed between generations, the content of the game was given minor adjustments to make the game marginally more polished, but many, countless mods and fan projects that would be considerable expansions (if we're going by ID Software's standards) aren't allowed to be redistributed to the mass market in a way that'd inspire indie developers in the way Cave Story itself initially did.
Now as gaming spheres from more niche sections of the web are learning about CS during its hayday there's an increasing necessity to navigate through the forum, various surrounding community sites, to even remotely understand the culture that surrounds it, as a result the obfuscation that goes on in the community has sorta caused the subcultures that kept the early community alive to drift to different IPs, etc. as opposed to staying within this ecosystem. There's many events that were only anthologized through mods, etc. and may depict events that matter in contextualizing core aspects of the emerging archetypes of Cave Story fans and related fandoms.

IP growth is spurred in large part by the audiovisual aspects of a title, as those are the most easily identifiable aspects to someone that would be in Cave Story's target demorgaphic (Let's say, teens)