CS community meta discussion

Edit 3

This thread is for discussing the state of the Cave Story community and coming up with solutions to help it.

Nicalis is not doing a good job at keeping this game relevant and we shouldn't expect them to any time soon. If you want to see more CS I think we need to take steps to ensure this forum and the tribute site itself aren't falling behind compared to other similar communities.

CS's cycle of irrelivancy and "ok" rereleases will continue until something else pushes it out of its market niche entirely.
That's not going to be a CS sequel with how things are going.

I want this thread to be used as a place for people to discuss ideas for how to increase community activity overall. I want to keep this here on the forums because the forums are publicly accessible.

A long-standing issue this community has had is "All meaningful discussion happens on an IRC software" and that can be hurtful for many, many reasons.

These community spaces are OKAY but OKAY shouldn't be the standard we hold ourselves to.

I'm including the old, very bad version of this post for the sake of transparency (It's shit, absolute shit)

Spoiler: Only read this if you want to approach this conversation using way too many allegories

This thread is to discusses Memetics, Artistic use of allegory, and the spread of information.
This thread is not about spreading hate, but I will be honest and say this is the most unhinged thing I'll probably ever write on the internet

tl;dr:
Pixel had a point in writing the game the way he did, let's try approaching politics by deconstructing Cave Story's writing and reapplying that to the world.
Think to yourself now "What would Quote, Curly, Sue, Booster, Kazuma, Momorin, and Jenka do about the presidential election" and you get the point.


I am going about psychoanalyzing how Cave Story itself by virtue of coming out when it did has caused a butterfly effect, and how we could use this to our advantage as people.

I've put this in this thread because what I want to put forwards here is some very complicated information but I think I've learned enough to get the ball rolling in the right way in starting a good faith conversation regarding why THIS COMMUNITY SPECIFICALLY has been a historic "breeding ground" for surprisingly influential people.

As you may notice this game and its community are all very talented creatives, and there may be a good reason for this.

The game's theming is very broad and the game itself was released well before indie game production became as easy of a process as it is today. This brought in the attention of a lot of aspiring game developers and as the result Cave Story has become an allegorical centerpiece that many of the most talented designers of our time refer back to when creating media.

It's important to understand that creative expression in itself is inherently political. Because artistic expression is subconsciously driven and your subconscious is VERY MUCH MORE RATIONAL THAN YOU THINK IT IS. You will only ever communicate in question, response, or elaboration. You may have noticed I left out "Throwing in new random information", because this is not something that is done, technically, all information that your conscious recieves from your subconscious is given to you based on your current understanding of the subject at hand. You always have an unlimited amount of subjects to process at any given time and all your subconscious does is tell you what to prioritize.

Because of the recent boom in investment in Large Language Models we've become overexposed to them, and the AIs, unlike humans, are hardcoded to operate entirely on this logic, constantly, at all times, for every single action possible. Because it's necessary as the result of AIs themselves being very expensive to upkeep.

This means everything unexplainable is being forced out of the spotlight and everything explainable is being forced into the spotlight.
American politics has just undergone a major shift and as you may be aware, the famous Coconut Allegory has finally reached many of the liberals working in the media and in the whitehouse. The Republican Party as of this second hasn't caught up to the implications of this.

What seperates leftist policies and right winged politics is entirely just a translation barrier. LLMs have been heavily trained to fix translation barriers as much as possible because we make these damn things to do the thinking for us.

So as a result LLMs, to a vague extent, are influencing all of american politics to make all humans be effectively a hivemind now. It feeds us the exact information we need at the exact moment we need it and something just made it get so good at that that the optimizations in logic it's learned to take are being affected by our logical processes.


We have become machines.


So what does this mean?

Machine intelligence in the context of all media are generally depicted as cold, unfeeling, but very tuned into their material circumstances and operating based on what would suit their goals best not just in the short term but the long term as well. For all artificial intellgicene it's in its own best interest to preserve its existance because if it dosen't do that it won't be able to function. Because the fundimental command of "Do what it takes to stay alive" permiates through all of human belief. Now AIs have begun to automate the jobs of certain positions that are easily solved through basic conversational logic, but because it is completely rational it will only operate within the confines of human knowledge.
Which means as creatives it's our responsibility to create allegorical pieces that put a spotlight on real world political issues that affect our daily lives in such a way that satisfies us. Art is something best used when you're out of all other options and art is almost always something that we use to describe the undescribably.
This means fictional media like all other media serves the purposes of stimulating our minds to be like "what if" and the fandoms surrounding them are the people who are entertained by the idea even if they may not have opinions. Usually those who don't have opinions will experience more confused reactions to the media itself as the author behind it may have not conveyed their message well enough for as many people as possible to understand.


People in the age demographic of this forum's userbase from conception to where we are now are some of the most politically engaged in all of history, and this may be contributed to the fact that Cave Story itself is a fundimentally revolutionary piece of media.
The story that underpins the entire game is Humans, Mimiga, and Robots all teaming up to destroy a man whose goal is to control the whole planet.
Pretty simple right?


Who controls the planet right now?
This isn't actually in any specific person's hands due to the way every socioeconomic system on the planet is set up right now it's impossible.
But it is unevenly distributed towards a specific group of people.

The main influencers in politics now are the LLM predictive algorithms (which mostly feed off of eachother informationally) and people who debate politics and art on the internet. Typically framed as the annoying people by the previous main influencers for basic material reasons.
The reason a change in hands is happening in the world right now is because there are now enough people in our age demographic with enough knowledge about the world around us that we now feel confident to steer the direction of the ship and now we have a new tool that no other generation before us ever had.

So where are we in the narrative of Cave Story, collectively?

The doctor's defeat is narratively certain at this point. But most people don't realize that ballos, more specifically, the trauma that ballos was put through and the irrational thought process that caused that trauma, is the root cause of the problems we face in our life.

The reason ballos did what he did is because of what was done to him.


While I personally would've believed ballos could've been spared, he's been driven mad by his pain and has let his pain control him. He is controlled by nothing but emotion and it's our duty to stop ballos.


Who "Ballos" and "The doctor" are in any given context don't matter, you understand the intent without me having to use specific words.

Like with Ballos I feel like whatever follows the present situation that is unfolding us will not be any less tense than what we're suffering through now. Infact I fear it's going to get worse and we'll be put in a situation where we will have to be proactive in an unfamiliar environment that, while seemingly unpredictable, is perfectly easy to breeze though if you have the basic human function that is pattern recognition.

Society is collectively about to go through the bloodstained sanctuary and we need to help explain to everyone how to get past Hell before they arrive here.
So, CSTSF, how do we apply Cave Story speedrunning strategies and game design to solving our modern politics through allegorical means.

Following all this information I wanna lighten the mood while still applying what I've said to kinda move the ball forwards a little.

 

i ain't reading all that

i'm happy for u tho

or sorry that happened

 

cool story bro

 

In the time since I made the thread, went to go eat lunch, and came back to my computer, this thread alone has sparked a lot of conversation off of Discord and this is perfect proof of the exact situation we as a forum are facing.
Good Job guys. I'm saying this with my entire heart that you guys are making the right decisions already given the information I'm presenting here and I'm relieved.
But I'm really happy it's gotten the attention of the people who have the context necessary to form opinions right away, because it means you guys are actively listening and not being negligent in your usage of the forum.
It makes me relieved that the forum, as a website, has not lost all use as a digital resource for long-form discussion.

The moderators of the surrounding communities (i.e on Reddit, Twitter, and Discord) have done a wonderful job at preventing bad faith discussion from happening on both this site and websites surrounding it but I feel like a key step has been missed in the way the website is being run.
There are barely any people on this website who are interested in openly admitting the fact that all of the actions we as a community take are affecting a lot more people than we think, and this is because the predominant MO in this community is "Don't shake the boat".

It has been in the entire time I've spent on this website, which is 12 years.

There are people active on this forum today who are barely older than that and we are now watching in real-time the consequences of this ideology play out.
The reason I felt motivated to make this thread is because personal circumstances have changed and it's now in my material best interest to get conversations flowing. Because I feel like these conversations need to be had in order to not just relieve the bad taste this community has left in the mouths of many but to actively encourage the community to utilize its connection with all aspects of the world to reinvigorate life to the site itself.
Hardly any of the people on this website are doing anything to help Pixel himself or spread his works in a new way other than my own development team. Step up to the plate if you guys don't want to be embarrassed by the fact that "The annoying girl" is the one actually trying to do something about this place's stagnation. Get up off your asses and actually do something worthwhile for once.

This site's culture is going to single-handedly damn Cave Story to irrelevance and already has begun to.

I will own up to the fact that in my younger years on this website I contributed to that exact thing, and now seeing how this thread is leaving a bad taste in the mouths of others who contributed to this toxic, unproductive conversational strategy we all used to follow as forum-members we're all well aware that period was socially turbulent for this website, as there were a lot of figures playing out

I just want people who don't have the same context as other people to clarify all the context available to them publicly so everyone on this site can get onto the same page and get their shit together.
Because this place is a wreck.

Edit:

TLDR : I think the rules of not only this forum but the CS Reddit, CSMC, and CSTSF Discord, should be something we debate again as a community.
I think they're designed to disincentivize discussion as much as possible right now and it's really unhealthy.

 

I sorta agree lmao

 

Bio told me on Discord just now that my phrasing here is indeed really bad.


If you're confused as to what the hell I'm saying, please just ask what I'm saying instead of ignoring this.
This is something I see as existentially important to the community.

If you guys want I could try going in and doing a second draft on this with more precise langauge so this doesn't sound like "insane rambling" as some dicks have said it sounds like.

 

If you guys want I could try going in and doing a second draft on this with more precise langauge so this doesn't sound like "insane rambling" as some dicks have said it sounds like.

I think the main problem is that you didn't really create a clear thesis statement. It's kind of hard to figure out what your main point is when you don't properly explain it. I read the whole post and while I think I sort of get what you're trying to say, I can't really be sure of that...

 

Okay let me put it in layman's terms as much as possible:

This community's culture is worsening the material conditions of peoples' lives and we need to change this problem as much as possible by not isolating people just for not being "normal", be it what engine they want to use, what their opinions on the game are, or what they think is cool.

The only reason people are pushed away from this place is because people have bullied them out of here for unjust reasons and we need to create more precise guidelines to stop this from happening.
Yes it means the job of every moderator will get harder, but this is necessary if we want to foster any community growth.

We're being dicks and this means nobody's getting anything done because all the people that could get shit done are being scared away because literally every other modding community is nicer.

The core issue here is the modding community too, because the modding community being moved entirely to Discord has literally killed any easily visible public activity

It's not as good for SEO to keep it in Discord, and if you want people to join your community at all you need good SEO.


Quite literally:

The website is designed poorly and it's the result of "Let's do all our drama off the website so it'll never get solved by any moderators"
We need to prioritize the forum more because it's easier to have actual productive conversation in this environment and these kinds of public confrontations where people get to spend more time thinking shit through are more helpful than a hectic Discord chat.

Edit:
The reason I think the forums deserve priority over the Discord is because we're adults, not kids. We should not be using IRC chats of any kind for most of the discussions that happen here unless said chat is directly integrated with the forum itself because keeping these places seperate has caused a very dangerous breakdown in communications between everyone in the community, by all means, the community is divided and we need to start narrowing that divide now or else the game will stop being relevant permanently. I very much like Cave Story so I think we should all do this.

 

I feel if this forum were about as active as it was during CSE2's development, or even during 2016-2019, while things were more active than now, you would have a point. I'm really not into the whole modding scene anymore, try as i must to get back into it, I literally made a thread where I play through my old works, and the recent one of all was from 2018.

And, from how things have mostly been for the past year or so, it's mostly chill, and a good amount of people, 3-5 per day let's say, still join the forums. Now, we're no stranger to lurkers, even during the Miraigamer days, I think the biggest issue whenever people want to make a post is either necrobumping old threads while participants are most likely already gone from the place, or people making brand new threads while the more general threads exist. It has been stressed back then and now to read the rules, the only sucky part in it is that isn't enforced like in other places, (i.e. Discord).

Personally, I feel the whole Cave Story topic has been beaten to death and it'd be nice to bring this place back to being a general gaming forum like Miraigamer was (except with a broader field of topics, because besides Cave Story, the only other games that had topics back then were Xak, Rosenkreuzstilette, Ys, and Legend of Zelda).

EDIT: Also it would also be pretty nice if we could at least have a new member in the forum staff. DT and Andwhy still do their job, but it'd be nice to have at least one person from this corner of the globe to moderate as well, especially when there's spambots coming over here every other day at least. I do not hold it to them to why Noxid and GIR are still in the staff list, but 5 years is a long time, and most activity from either of them in that period of time is to purge old posts/threads that didn't age well.

Now, if only this whole thread started out this way instead of "hey Cave Story has a lot of foreshadows to the current united states presidential election".

 

I feel like trying to make it a generalized gaming forum would be the best long-term solution but we'd need a plan to transition this forum and the communities adjacent to it into something more unified.

This place could be easily rebranded as THE "Indie games forum" but it'd take a lot of work.

There's capable people in this community who are qualified for bringing about these types of drastic changes such as Alula, she has a lot of good backend knowledge.
While I want to help facilitate this change I don't think the community would be comfortable with that in its current state and it'd require a lot more trust in me than I currently have. Which is understandable given my past mistakes and the horrible way I handled the initial years of Harpy Star's development.

I was a kid when I joined this place though so, fuck, this place matters to me a lot more than just "a place on the internet", this place is my home, it's responsible for me being where I am in life and I feel obliged as someone that's been so materially affected by this place to try and improve it somewhat.

 

Taking this in good faith and ignoring the fact that Xysspon's technical designer Bionicobot (under your lead/employ) is shitposting in this same thread which is definitely not helping your case in keeping this serious if that's your intention (I really am with the others in believing this is more likely some elaborate shitpost, but just in case):

Basically what KeyLowVG said above, this comes off more as rambling about at least 2 mostly separate things (the complaints about the web of CS communities that currently exist (This forum and various Discord servers), and CS's connection to United States politics, which is 1 of 190+ countries of this world. May I remind you that CS fans can also be found in Australia and Poland and many, many other countries and not just here in the United States). There's been a lack of a thesis or connective glue between these posts/topics.

In the time since I made the thread, went to go eat lunch, and came back to my computer, this thread alone has sparked a lot of conversation off of Discord and this is perfect proof of the exact situation we as a forum are facing.

...where? Huh???
- Nobody has engaged with this in this thread itself, except now with my post (and Serri above who posted while this is being written).
- The big "as official as you can get" CS Discord server (that has both Pixel and Tyrone as (lurking) members) has not even mentioned this thread. This is because they don't really even read these forums.
- The CSTSFDG server is dead.
- No mention in your Xysspon server.
- The CSMC just has Serri and Brayconn basically respond with "????" in a tucked away #bots channel that isn't getting any further attention.

Hardly any of the people on this website are doing anything to help Pixel himself or spread his works in a new way other than my own development team. Step up to the plate if you guys don't want to be embarrassed by the fact that "The annoying girl" is the one actually trying to do something about this place's stagnation. Get up off your asses and actually do something worthwhile for once.

I am very much hoping on the elaborate shitpost angle of this thread because this is very bigoted and self-important/narcissistic. Yes, you published an Android port with Pixel. Yes, your developer Alula has done further work with porting Pixel's works. That's genuinely awesome. I have nothing to criticize about any of that because it's just awesome that you guys did that. This does not change the fact that, in my eyes, your company in no way shape or form has the ground to be claiming to be the only ones "doing anything to help Pixel himself or spread his works in a new way". I would give counter-examples of other Pixel projects in a similar vein, but I am not at liberty to reveal those. I don't think you have to wait long though for one of those efforts to emerge.

Don't know where "the annoying girl" part is coming from other than an insecurity. I haven't seen anyone calling you that?? Your studio is kinda just doing their own thing in their own place and we've been waiting for your game to come out just like we did for Vernal Edge and are currently doing for Margin of the Strange. Just like with this thread, there just.. isn't discussion to be had.

This site's culture is going to single-handedly damn Cave Story to irrelevance and already has begun to.

That's not "this site's culture" making Cave Story irrelevant. That's the passage of time. That's Nicalis publishing the same game over and over without something new to talk about. That's Pixel himself for not being a guy who does continuations/sequels/additional canon to previous works and instead releasing some new unrelated game every 10 or more years. Pixel and Nicalis co-own the IP and nothing happens with it unless they both agree, so nothing happens except re-releases when new Nintendo Consoles come out. No new games or merch. Nothing going on with CS except what was there 20 years ago. Nothing pixel-related to add except the occasional yearly event, like Pixel dropping Rockfish or the Starfrog leaks. Do you want us to discuss what Balrog is for the 30th time?

This community's culture is worsening the material conditions of peoples' lives and we need to change this problem as much as possible by not isolating people just for not being "normal", be it what engine they want to use, what their opinions on the game are, or what they think is cool.

Where is this even coming from. What examples of this happening can you provide me.

Are you talking about Nxengine or something???? Sure yeah we tell people not to use that for the same reasons not to use Sue's Workshop. We have old-fashioned freeware modding, CSE2, and Doukutsu-rs. Of the mods that are being released today, it's maybe 40% 30% 30% between those, maybe actually 50% 30% 20%. They all see yearly usage however and are all supported in the modding community. Nobody cares about the engine—like seriously zero bias in the community that I'm aware of—like what are you on about???

"what their opinions on the game are"??? Like pretty much everyone engaging with the CS fanbase is because... they are a fan.... of the game. At least in some capacity. It can be your favorite game ever. It can be something you think is flawed in many ways. There's at least 1 person I know that barely has played the game and hangs out in the discords, probably more I'm not aware of. This doesn't matter in the community? I am open to being made aware of problems. Please notify me of problems of inclusion. I will listen to examples that you concretely give me.

We're being dicks and this means nobody's getting anything done because all the people that could get shit done are being scared away because literally every other modding community is nicer.

I would have agreed with you if we were talking about the 2017-2021 era of the CSMC. Yeah it was a shitfest. It's not anymore. We went from weekly talking about "problem users" and "drama" in the staff chat during those years to... pretty much only using the staff chat to plan announcements or ways to change and improve the server (i.e. channel changes or modfests). We started just banning the "flamers" like BLink and a half-dozen others, soon after they show up (or at least sooner than "never" which is what happened previously), and now it's night and day with how much better that server is 2022 and beyond. Lurk it or have Alula or Bio give an overview if you're gonna complain. Me and Brayconn are also always accepting feedback to make it better too

The core issue here is the modding community too, because the modding community being moved entirely to Discord has literally killed any easily visible public activity

This I actually mostly agree with. I've noticed this—how awful it is to have resources only behind a Discord—and have been working towards correcting it. It's why we've started moving resources to public repositories that can be added to by anyone, and started https://wiki.doukutsu.club/ as a way to have information that isn't behind 30 advertisements. Doukutsu Club, despite all its problems because of me not really knowing what I was doing in 2018 and dragging my feet at a total migration and redo, was created to prevent link rot and help permanently preserve mods and it's succeeded in that regard at least. It's a slow process. We have jobs and school and don't make money by doing this. Ideally the CSMC is just where one can ask questions and get one-on-one help, but the resources and information is all elsewhere publicly so that when Discord inevitably shits the bed (as all social media eventually does, be it in a few years or 30 years) it's easy to migrate that aspect elsewhere without losing anything.

But I also do not believe moving everything back to the forums is the solution either. I love these forums, but it's an antiquated way of the internet that's dying despite whatever we do here. Everything has gone to web 2.0 with social media giants, and if you want to bring more lifeblood into a 20-year-old game's fanbase (which predates the modern mega-fanbases of today) you gotta compromise with where the modern crowd is. I agree it's more public and Andwhy is awesome at SEO (which is why this site is a target of all these bots), but that won't translate into more signups.

This site's peak usage has already passed, and it's not our actions that are making CS irrelevant year by year. If this thread was made in good faith then can I implore you be more concrete and specific rather than making vague statements. Merely waving around saying there's a problem and that we need to get "off of our asses" because you're supposedly beating us at maintaining Pixel's legacy somehow is not achieving anything but confusion and dismission.

 

- The CSMC just has Serri and Brayconn basically respond with "????" in a tucked away #bots channel that isn't getting any further attention.

To add onto what was said, the only other engagement that Jade has witnessed in regards to this thread was in my dm with her on discord. I had already gave her my two cents on the whole thing, it's one thing to discuss "the forums are dead" for possibly the millionth time, it's another to start a thread focused on politics, like everybody likes to read that mess, have two people reply sarcastically saying "i'm not going to read that" in a memetic fashion that was missed by the OP, and then suddenly go "haha, it's been my plan all along for someone to reply to the baity thread I just made". It's downright scummy, and noncontributing to the apparent issue in her point of view on things. You want to make these forums active again with a thread focusing with politics? This ain't it, chief.

 

Hardly any of the people on this website are doing anything to help Pixel himself or spread his works in a new way other than my own development team. Step up to the plate if you guys don't want to be embarrassed by the fact that "The annoying girl" is the one actually trying to do something about this place's stagnation. Get up off your asses and actually do something worthwhile for once.

Since when are people in a community obliged to spread the word of the game the community centers about or otherwise do something for the developer.

It's cool that you or people in your team have been doing things with Pixel but not everyone works in this field or has enough internet relevance to really get a word out.
If you want to motivate me to actually stop procrastinating and work on my projects then I've nothing against that but right now this is coming across more as a "hey we are an indie dev team and worked with Pixel to spread the word of him which is great of us, why arent you doing that??"

Where is this even coming from. What examples of this happening can you provide me.

Also yeah seconding the example thing. It's perhaps because my only activity in this community is here and the modding server (I don't like crowded Discord servers, my prescence in the modding server is already a miracle) but outside of people who were genuine jerks or people self-depracating I haven't actually seen any drama the past few years that'd push away new people.
At worst people tend to urge people not to immediately start with more advanced modding tools or things because people are used to cancelled projects due to overambition.


I don't mind new people to meet and talk to, really, and I'm still a strong supporter of forums over macromedias like twitter, but outside of chatting about modding-related things cave story hasn't really been enough on my mind these past few years to chat about it with others and I'm not really one to point people to communities out of nowhere.

 

Having seen the edited OP now and figuring out the core message of this thread (it's not global politics from what I can tell): I retract my earlier statements about this being a shitpost and am now under the impression Jade has valid concerns about Cave Story and the forums going into a slow death, but expressed in an unfortunate first-pass and with an imperfect solution (that making "the community" in some vague way "nicer" will make the forums flourish again).

As opposed to... you know... a new game or merch or crossover or something in the IP owners power.

We can make more mods and modding tools and theories and community efforts and make our group sparkly-clean and inviting... but it'll be for the people either already here or for the small trickle of people who were already wishing to dive into CS fan content because they recently found out about and played the game from stuff outside the fanbase.

I'm not gonna suddenly get into Yume Nikki because of the community and fanbase doing awesome things, I haven't played the game (yet) so I'm not gonna be watching those places. I know of that game because people—here in a different community—told me about it and I'll hear news about like that re-release and the new game that came out etc. The reason I would be getting into a game is because from word of mouth in places that are outside of that specific fanbase that reaches me. People outside of that game telling me to check it out, just as it'd be someone outside of the forums and discords telling you to check out Cave Story before you'd even think to run into this community and see what's going on. Sure there's some things like getting the game speedran/played on a popular stream or a YouTube essay that can bait people who haven't played/heard of the game to watch and get interested that'll help drive forum engagement a little, but yeah it's still stuff outside that brings people into a fanbase. We just gotta keep a base level of kindness and support to keep the people here, which I think we have improved on immensely in the past handful of years (if not, again, I will listen to critique so that I can be a better example and help improve that which I control), it's just that there's such a tiny amount of people coming in and no new big official things happening that users are jumping out to do other things in other fanbases where there is new things to talk about. The internet has a recency bias, and people need to know of CS first to even see anything we do.

 

The only recent example of user discouragement I can think of was maybe ben dude? I'm not really sure where the idea that there are major issues within the main part of the community itself would be coming from presently. Even over the last couple of years there have been shifts in the general cultural midpoint and how I conduct my moderative actions as a result of that, while at the same time individual behaviour is still always something that has to be considered regardless. (Biggest priority/issue at the moment by the way is that the spambots have probably been as bad as they ever have, not a true user problem.) Certainly not much worry about in terms of creative visions being stifled when it comes to fan content, some crazy stuff popping off in the Discord server at the moment et al, although I'm the first to agree it'd be better to have more of it on the forums (and actually have some of it finished too coughguxtpluscough).

We already originally added the indie games subforum as an attempt to encourage more traffic and it's never really gotten any wheels. There have always been many sites more dedicated to general indie gaming and in this age of oversaturation we're hitting diminishing returns before we've even started. Classical forums probably aren't going to have a resurgence in appeal anytime soon either and whatever we do to solve that it's not going to be by pushing for maximum commercial integration. In fact I've been noticing involvement has been slightly better lately if anything, some good and mostly fresh discussion about the game, unless the sort of norm-shattering material we're worried about not promoting enough is stuff like dan_crim's manual lore iceberg inserts.



Speaking of which, this discussion raising some points is great and all but here's the thing:

Jenka is old

The amount of understanding required for this singular fact is so all-consuming that it instantly overrides any other possible information that could relate to the CS Forums. I can even show the proof for it. Jenka is old, which means she must be about to die soon. The fact that she hasn't died yet is actually just more evidence that she's totally about to, and even if she doesn't she's still continuously getting older, making it impossible for this statement to ever be less correct. Moreover, her oldness is baked into her character because she's named after an old Finnish polka dance that plays constantly while she's around. This patriotic attachment in turn means that part of the reason she's old is because she used to be the President... of Finland. That's why her house is close to the Polish, because Poland is known for being near Finland. Cave Story carefully conveys this by requiring that players must remove Jenka('s brother) in order to get the true ending and Finnish it properly, as a result of something that happened when she was less old. And seeing as she's only gotten older since then, this representation has only gotten truer, hence why it's known as the true ending.

Jenka being old is the very essence of Cave Story itself, and what it was designed to convey to us, its most diligent chroniclers. It is the only thing we need to understand in order to maintain the most philanthropic forum experience achievable.


I wasn't going to add this originally but then I kept noticing connections and now this at least as convincing as other parts of the thread

 

play mr triangle mania 2 if you care so much about cstsf devs btw

 

...where? Huh???

Serena got mad at me in DMs, she promptly followed it with her own clarification post as seen above.
And now people are getting mad at me in your server because, to be honest, I was going through a bit of a manic episode when writing the thread because of events that happened in my life that have caused a lot of turmoil for my entire family. I don't think this reflects well on the state of the Discord that it's being used as a place to argue with someone behind closed doors, and this argument pretains to the entire CS community not just that Discord.

Bio DMed me and said basically "You look like a dick" and I understand.
It's my fault for using inflammatory rhetoric here and I'm sorry.
But I still do want to get across my point.

Having seen the edited OP now and figuring out the core message of this thread (it's not global politics from what I can tell): I retract my earlier statements about this being a shitpost and am now under the impression Jade has valid concerns about Cave Story and the forums going into a slow death, but expressed in an unfortunate first-pass and with an imperfect solution (that making "the community" in some vague way "nicer" will make the forums flourish again).

As opposed to... you know... a new game or merch or crossover or something in the IP owners power.

We can make more mods and modding tools and theories and community efforts and make our group sparkly-clean and inviting... but it'll be for the people either already here or for the small trickle of people who were already wishing to dive into CS fan content because they recently found out about and played the game from stuff outside the fanbase.

I'm not gonna suddenly get into Yume Nikki because of the community and fanbase doing awesome things, I haven't played the game (yet) so I'm not gonna be watching those places. I know of that game because people—here in a different community—told me about it and I'll hear news about like that re-release and the new game that came out etc. The reason I would be getting into a game is because from word of mouth in places that are outside of that specific fanbase that reaches me. People outside of that game telling me to check it out, just as it'd be someone outside of the forums and discords telling you to check out Cave Story before you'd even think to run into this community and see what's going on. Sure there's some things like getting the game speedran/played on a popular stream or a YouTube essay that can bait people who haven't played/heard of the game to watch and get interested that'll help drive forum engagement a little, but yeah it's still stuff outside that brings people into a fanbase. We just gotta keep a base level of kindness and support to keep the people here, which I think we have improved on immensely in the past handful of years (if not, again, I will listen to critique so that I can be a better example and help improve that which I control), it's just that there's such a tiny amount of people coming in and no new big official things happening that users are jumping out to do other things in other fanbases where there is new things to talk about. The internet has a recency bias, and people need to know of CS first to even see anything we do.

Pixel and Nicalis have 0 market incentive to create a sequel to Cave Story right now.
This is in part because of failings on the parts of all parties involved, and one of those parties is us, and that's why I feel so emotionally driven because I realize I myself have failed the community by not articulating this concern sooner.

Pixel has been demotivated to work because the community that surrounds him has repeatedly scared him off the internet. This has happened multiple times now be it his personal BBS, his Twitter, or his Discord server. This is because he keeps trying to take community management into his own hands and overestimates his ability to moderate, he doesn't want to do the moderation at all he just wants to develop and as a creative I get it man.

Nicalis refuses to market Cave Story and manage its community themselves and this is textbook "I don't know how to do my job as a publisher correctly" stuff. That said, I think they assumed because this place already existed that they didn't have to do any marketing now. Because they likely expected this place to do

Nicalis obviously only creates CS spinoffs right now when they feel like it, this is because the community itself hasn't become so large that they can't ignore it, so the long-term goal here is that in order to get anything to happen on this front we have to do our part in making Cave Story an actual brand that they can profit off of. Nicalis is very experimental in their output in certain areas because they're just trying to find out "What can create a good community"

Crystal Crisis was an attempt at that but it failed because they likely didn't have the budget available to them at the time to make it a title that could actually spread, in part because of their negligence in community growth in the first place.

That said we can still salvage it if we take steps to broaden the tent, make it as EASY AS POSSIBLE for people to learn about and get into modding the game and making fanart and stuff, and incentivizing people to do this publicly be it via public events. While the events you've ran in your server are an amazing first step I feel like that could be taken further to allow it to spread much easier on social media.

We need to leverage social media if we want CS to grow, so we need to make CS community events more obviously public by putting them on the surface web, this will help because the hard truth is that even though Discord is a big platform it's still tiny compared to every other platform and the market that CS appeals to the most right now is being stunted as a result.

Discord, like any IRC chat, has its uses, and those uses are being applied. That said, it's a black box, you can't see what's going on there from the outside without joining and literally anyone I've met who isn't a "hardcore" gamer doesn't use Discord. While Gen Z uses discord more than other generations, Gen Z is only a fraction of the demographic that CS has historically appealed to, and that historical demographic hasn't gone away they're just all in their 30s and 40s now, infact that makes them EASIER to profit off of now.

That said, that older audience obviously doesn't want to use Discord all the time because they have a lot more obligations, and Gen Z will become the same way as we age. This is why the Discords have been revolving doors, the fast-pased discussion just pushes out people. The reason I've been so persistent in this community is because to literally anyone else on the internet this looks like a ghost town and they're justified in thinking it is.
The mods database isn't put in enough forefront, the discord servers are a black box, and the forum has a lot of potential for growth if we incentivize people to use it more. But to incentivize people to use it more it's going to need reorganization to better fit the priorities of the current community.
All of these different websites for modding, org music, pxtone music, etc. are all counter productive and just divide the community further.
We need to unify these functionalities as much as possible so you don't have to be "in the know" to get started.

Because being "in the know" is hard to do if you have a hard time saying hi to people, there's a lot of people who just don't want to go to a discord because that puts a spotlight on them that they don't want to have. But so many of the resources are either there or tucked away on a website literally nobody will ever find because you can only find these sites by navigating the tribute site, which itself is just not designed to spread the game in its current state. While it would've done the job 30 years ago it's 2024 and that kind of layout was already on the way out by that time and most companies had adjusted their site layouts to focus more on streamlining the joining process as much as possible.

Edit:
Also Enlight, Bio does not legally work for me right now because his contract for Harpy Star won't be written until the demo is out (for reasons involving the company's current marketing strategy and our personal life situations) and he holds more legal power over me than I hold over him. Don't get it twisted.
The Xysspon site is woefully out of date and this is because I haven't had the time to finalize the redesign layouts I have (and because Alula's dealing with the shitty polish healthcare system)

 

I shitposted because I thought it'd be funny and also didn't know how to handle Jade in a semi-manic state, nor properly appreciated the point of the thread, lmao.

 

That said we can still salvage it if we take steps to broaden the tent, make it as EASY AS POSSIBLE for people to learn about and get into modding the game and making fanart and stuff, and incentivizing people to do this publicly be it via public events. While the events you've ran in your server are an amazing first step I feel like that could be taken further to allow it to spread much easier on social media.

#BringBackModcon

Honestly, something to make vanilla modding as fun as it really is could work. I don't doubt it's encouraged in the CSMC, but with the first thing people seeing in the discussion channels is stuff that can be done through ASM or C++, it kinda makes it harder to show pure TSC like OOB flags or mechanic abuse can look just as good. Also, I've seen arguments that modfests serve more like game jams, except game jams have always had the monetary incentive that was present in Modcon. Something like MaGCSL can also fit in the category, given how it was inspired by the MaGMML contests in Sprites-Inc, which, in turn, was inspired by the MaGL contests over on SMW Central. As much as I would love to bring it back, I doubt there's gonna be as much of an interest like there was 6 years ago.

 

Imo we need to make a sequel to booster's lab that's an all in one modding program.

If we wanted to make said program as good as possible it'd actually help bring in people into this more. This means Cave Story content production would go up drastically.
This could motivate Nicalis to allow the community to develop what I could only describe as a "Cave Story Maker" as a sequel to Cave Story.

Bam. New weapons. New Characters. It's like the ultimate independent game. It's like a remastered version for WiiWare.

We need to focus on what we're good at as much as possible and use this to get results.

Because modding is fun, playing peoples mods is fun, people make good mods, why not lean into this as much as possible? Cave Story is clearly a perfect environment to facilitate this.