Mods general discussion

I think the community should work together and make a giant sequel / prequel mod/fangame. Do concept art, actual story writing, etc etc, and just pitch it to Nicalis and Pixel to get permission to make an official sequel.

My advice: Don't pitch CS stuff to Nicalis to make it official. There is a (small but real) chance they'll actually be interested, but getting Nicalis AND Pixel involved comes with caveats. Even if you hypothetically had a magically perfect pitch/concept that they love that doesn't mean it'll make it through development to release. I think anyone who is somewhat following the yearly CS news knows of a handful of CS-adjacent projects worked on internally at Nicalis that didn't follow through. Those are the public ones. There are projects not publicly known that also got shuttered or are in indefinite limbo.

If you yourself (or a group of fans) have what it takes to finish a CS project, you're better off using your own resources to make it to release. What's the benefit of making it official?
Money? Getting accepted by Nicalis will get you a paycheck sure, but you're gambling the pitch through a casino with low chances of anyone seeing or hearing about it. Money in replacement of creative passion.
Fame/Public Awareness? There's ways to do that with fan projects. Write a press release and send it around if it's attention to the project you're after. If you write most of the article and provide the screenshots for them, gaming news sites generally won't have a problem throwing it up for the free clicks.
Validation/the chance to work with Pixel himself? The idealistic perfect version of him inside some fan's heads is not true to the real person. He endlessly revises, tinkers, and often scraps his own work because it's not good enough in his eyes. A perfectionist in his work who must reiterate everything. This behavior doesn't stop with more people involved, and he co-owns the CS IP so what he says goes.

That's my personal viewpoint on the matter. The anecdotes/sources it is based off of can't be shared. I openly accept people ignoring it because of the lack of evidence I am providing.

@EnlightenedOne you want all rights?

.......what? Like what does this even supposed to imply/mean. I'm just a random person really.
If you're referring to the rights of CS... it should be Pixel and whoever else he wants to share that with?
If you're talking about a hypothetical CS collab, it should be between the people making the thing????
Are you asking me to start a sequel collaboration because of a perceived leadership trait or something?
I'm really intrigued why I specifically was mentioned here.

 

I think anyone who is somewhat following the yearly CS news knows of a handful of CS-adjacent projects worked on internally at Nicalis that didn't follow through. Those are the public ones.

Not to get off-topic, but do you have any links to share? I'm interested in reading about this, but I haven't been following the news and don't really know where to look

 

Getting accepted by Nicalis will get you a paycheck sure, but you're gambling the pitch through a casino with low chances of anyone seeing or hearing about it. Money in replacement of creative passion.

It could be a sonic mania moment, but idk, there's alot of capable people from this community. The issue right now is "Can you make a worthy successor", and in my time trying to peel back what makes games like Cave Story and Harpy Star enjoyable and unenjoyable I've kinda figured out that this genre of game has really only scratched the surface of the theoretical full scope of the genre. It's an untamed wild and nobody's really trying because everyone in the industry is too focused on trying to make Super Metroid for the 80 millionth time. The Harpy Star demo's happening this year I can say that for sure, aiming for late august but no promises tbh because im moving to san francisco that month, so I think then we can see if there's meaningful ways to enhance the core of Cave Story's design philosophy.

I know this is distracting from the modding discussion a lot but I think now's a good time to bring it up.