Apr 6, 2025 at 11:53 PM
Join Date: Sep 22, 2012
Location: Hell
Posts: 630
Age: 22
Pronouns: She/It
If there's anything about the game that's been preserved INCREDIBLY well, it's the rocks. Like the rocks of the real world they are foundational, and even though they are often compressed, what makes them up is very easy to reliably recreate, because there's no shortage of evidence left over in how those rocks were drawn, roughly when in development they were made, and which rocks are similar to which other rocks.
Cave Story has a lot of different tilesets that are recolors of other tilesets made during earlier phases of development, with minor tweaks and inconsistencies here and there.
Though pixel's skill increased very steadily as he worked on each asset, as the development pace picked up in the latter stages of development it clearly forced him to have to reuse assets in areas that, due to the nature of BMP files, could've just been their own tilesets. But let's just say that he did it for the sake of retro.
Which tileset in Cave Story do you find the most appealing? What about it stood out to you the most? Favorite tile? Palette?
Beta tilesets are welcome, since we basically have most of them to our knowledge, we might as well include those as viable candidates for discussion since they come up so frequently in mods.
I'll start:
PrtAlmond is such a good exercise of Pixel's artfulness and scope management within the context of "Bang for his buck", if you ask me. It's only used at one point in the game, it's not a particularly large tileset but the majority of the actual tiles the player sees are spent on the background.
Tiles are all made out of basic geometric shapes, repeated, mirrored, and adjusted to give proper shading (Which is extremely inconsistent and bugs me sometimes because it's not gotten much better in the rereleases)
The shapes in question are covered with stains to give the implication of reinforced steel built incredibly intentionally, waterlogged, but holding strong against The Core's magic.
The player's choices in this segment are as intricate as the choices preceding it, the player being given hints of what's to come through the camera panning to reveal the corpses of machines similar to the player that tried and failed to deliver the island the fate Quote and Curly ended up bringing about on their own, maybe it's their General Intelligence that allowed them to succeed in their mission in the end, in spite of all the disaster others like them could have caused, but the difficulty and corpses beg to differ. I'd like to imagine the choice to make the 4th gate the one that's broken is a joke about "Alt+F4" to tell the player to close the game and not inflict it on the mimiga. A bit meta for CS if you ask me, but it's important to consider this story beat was one of the most iterated on story beats throughout the entire game's development, seeing it survived from the beta, and reused a song from Pixel's previous game.
Cave Story has a lot of different tilesets that are recolors of other tilesets made during earlier phases of development, with minor tweaks and inconsistencies here and there.
Though pixel's skill increased very steadily as he worked on each asset, as the development pace picked up in the latter stages of development it clearly forced him to have to reuse assets in areas that, due to the nature of BMP files, could've just been their own tilesets. But let's just say that he did it for the sake of retro.
Which tileset in Cave Story do you find the most appealing? What about it stood out to you the most? Favorite tile? Palette?
Beta tilesets are welcome, since we basically have most of them to our knowledge, we might as well include those as viable candidates for discussion since they come up so frequently in mods.
I'll start:
PrtAlmond is such a good exercise of Pixel's artfulness and scope management within the context of "Bang for his buck", if you ask me. It's only used at one point in the game, it's not a particularly large tileset but the majority of the actual tiles the player sees are spent on the background.
Tiles are all made out of basic geometric shapes, repeated, mirrored, and adjusted to give proper shading (Which is extremely inconsistent and bugs me sometimes because it's not gotten much better in the rereleases)
The shapes in question are covered with stains to give the implication of reinforced steel built incredibly intentionally, waterlogged, but holding strong against The Core's magic.
The player's choices in this segment are as intricate as the choices preceding it, the player being given hints of what's to come through the camera panning to reveal the corpses of machines similar to the player that tried and failed to deliver the island the fate Quote and Curly ended up bringing about on their own, maybe it's their General Intelligence that allowed them to succeed in their mission in the end, in spite of all the disaster others like them could have caused, but the difficulty and corpses beg to differ. I'd like to imagine the choice to make the 4th gate the one that's broken is a joke about "Alt+F4" to tell the player to close the game and not inflict it on the mimiga. A bit meta for CS if you ask me, but it's important to consider this story beat was one of the most iterated on story beats throughout the entire game's development, seeing it survived from the beta, and reused a song from Pixel's previous game.
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