I am PonStefon. For the interested, My name comes from a mondegreen of Von Kaiser from Punch-Out!! Wii. I somehow misheard "KAMPFSTIEFEL!" as "PONSTEFON!" and ran with it.
Anyways, I first played Cave Story back in 2009-ish, and was inspired to start modding it after hearing about and playing Shmitz's Jenka's Nightmare. Specifically, I was pissed that after using the Machine Gun to get to the top of Chimney the only reward was Oblivion: Erosion, which was just Plantation but full of breakable blocks and devoid of pretty much anything interesting. I got Sue's Workshop and set to work messing around, screwing up tilesets and overflowing my max hp because I couldn't figure out how flags worked (at first).
A year or two later I had the basics of scripting and shit figured out and decided to make a mod of my own. I thought it would be something cool to show off to my highschool friends, and I was gonna put them in it and everything! That idea was never fully realized, mostly due to a lack of clear vision. (Around this point I dropped Sue's Workshop for Cave Editor and never looked back. Also during this time, I played MagicDoors' and ZarroTsu's revamped versions of JN, and I gotta say, both of them did an excellent job. Zarro's was better though, no offense.)
Then, after a few years of on-and-off modding for fun, I had the idea to make a mod with a really minimalist visual style, and got to work. I realized that most of the people I had wanted to show the mod to were either off in other states for college or just not interested in Cave Story, then further realized that this entire forum had existed since before I even played the game and would've been the perfect audience for mods of my own creation. Surely people who've played this game for years would have the same continued interest in the game as I had right? At the very least, someone would understand the time and effort that goes into scripting and level design and all that technical shit.
And here I am. I hope I'm not too late to join the party.