Wishlist

Out of curiousity (and perhaps to inspire someone to work on a hack), what would you like to see changed in or added to Cave Story's game engine?

Myself, I'd love to see acrobatics. Sliding under stuff, holding on ledges, dodging projectiles, or even wall-jumping. Quote is very "static" in terms of controls and can't even run, much less climb stuff or whatever.

Directional shooting would be cool too. Maybe aiming with the mouse and reserving the arrow keys solely for movement. You could reconfigurate the right mouse button to jump to avoid a finger-ache, too. Sadly implanting this via a hack would be a LOT of trouble and effort.

Giving enemies resistances would be cool. The game more or less does this (ie, using the blade on Ma Pignon) but not to the point where one gun would be better against a boss than another.

 

Ledges and wall jumping sounds pretty awesome, but I don't know about mouse shooting. It's been my experience that 2d shooters that use the mouse end up being either too easy since you just move the mouse to the enemy, or too hard because you need to coordinate, dodge, and aim all at once.

 

I've seen some 2D shooters with mouse aiming pulling it off very well, but with CS the way it currently is, it wouldn't work. It works best when enemies keep their distances and try to get you by means of projectiles; if enemies are always up close and personal, it's just too damned easy.

I dread an assembly hack to permit this. I can't say I've ever screwed around with the message queue in a hack, which makes it a very appealing challenge, but the sheer amount of code would hurt.

Plenty of games make really great use of acrobatics. Metroid Fusion comes to mind, as do the various incarnations of the Megaman X/Zero series. Silver, a game I was working on but put off until after Endless Saga, had a system where you could dodge attacks by side-stepping quickly. When properly used, you could run up to something, dodge a bullet, and take them out before they can fire again - it was awesome and coupled with other elements, made for very intense gameplay. Even a fighting game like Samurai Shodown III had mechanics like that that made for really involving fights (dodge, attack, parry, dodge again, parry, close in, quickly step around the opponent, hit, parry...)

The lack of ladders is disturbing and slightly annoying - getting the player out of a deep underwater passage when they can only jump 2 blocks high is only possible with current (which is not always wanted depending on the area) or blocks placed near each other (which is a hassle and an awful restriction on maps...)

 

Well i dont really like the mouse idea, but the enemy idea is great! Maybe you can a item named Jump Boots? Would be sure cool. Or a Grativity changer?

 

Well this isn't about hacks so much as the game itself, or more specifically the game engine and what it can and can't do. But hacking some of the things mentionned so far is highly possible (in fact, I already have jump boots in my hack, and the two extra playable characters have a few extra moves to their arsenal. )

Speaking of extra characters, it's a shame Pixel didn't push the idea of having multiple characters at once further. For instance, fighting in the storehouse with King would've been cool. Or maybe with Sue when you find her in the egg corridor.

 

I would have loved for cave story to have a networked co-op mode in the style of the kirby games (i.e. only one player can open doors, trigger events, etc..). However I'm also kind of glad that it doesn't as it would take some of the charm out of the game.

 

One change I would like to see is more dynamic enemy AI. As it is, most enemies in Cave Story are pretty bland, animal-ish; they generally sit (or fly) around in one spot, and only do anything if you approach too closely or attack them. The few enemies that do more than that, like actively hunt down the player, are much more interesting and challenging, but even those are fairly simple. It would be great to have enemies that, say, lie low until the player is distracted by another enemy or a series of tricky jumps and then launch an ambush, or run away when injured, or coordinate their attacks with other enemies, that sort of thing.

 

Well adding acrobatics might be kind of neat, but it seems to me that it might not really work that well with the current Cave Story engine and environments. I guess it could be done, but at that point you're not really dealing with Cave Story anymore, you'll be dealing strictly with a baseball cap wearing Samus Aran in SRDoukutsu388.

Ladders would be nice, higher jumping would be nice and I really like the idea of being able to switch weapons to use more effectively on certain bosses and such. What about the ability to get all of the different weapons in the game and making more use of the jetpack to help with speed and mobility issues. Perhaps there could be a way to charge it so that it works longer and more effectively, perhaps a reserve fuel tank that could be found for it with an indicator that show you how much flight time you have left.

-SkyeWelse

 

Ducking (and crawling) and ladders would be my top two. Maybe hanging off cliffs as well.

 

How about making a store system? Make it so you can HAVE more than 5 weapons, but never have more than that in your inventory, and when you get to a checkpoint thing, you can switch between them.

EDIT:

Giving enemies resistances would be cool. The game more or less does this (ie, using the blade on Ma Pignon) but not to the point where one gun would be better against a boss than another.

Would it be possible to literally make one weapon more effective, such as the Polar Star do twice as much damage against some bosses, such as Omega or the Core?

 

Sure, it'd be possible. You can just check which weapon is equipped and add 'x' health everytime the enemy is hit. It's a bit of a roundabout way of doing things, but it'd work. Otherwise you can add some code and data to store attributes in weapons and enemies, but that'd be a very complicated hack that would involve a lot of data reorganizing.

I think someone could "easily" add a store via nothing more than Sue's workshop. It probably wouldn't be able to handle money (unless someone comes up with some creative way to use flags - there's probably some way to create a basic binary-based calculator...) but swapping weapons around would be easy. The boss run hack has a somewhat similare way of doing things.

Using weapon energy as money would rock. You could buy new weapons and/or upgrades for your current items, maybe extra stuff (health powerups, items like the potion or the arms barrier...)

 

I love the idea of getting upgrades for weapons and trade them in for other ones.

 

Directional shooting would be cool too. Maybe aiming with the mouse and reserving the arrow keys solely for movement. You could reconfigurate the right mouse button to jump to avoid a finger-ache

I never really thought of playing cave story with a keyboard & mouse since I have a controller I never bothered to deal with the difficulty of playing it with the keyboard

 

I remembered another thing that I'd wanted: more faces.
I think even just a few more faces (most likely malco, a generic Koron, a generic shovel brigade and the dogs) would give the game a nicer feel.

 

Something I've been thinking recently:

The motorbike. In my recent mod, I'll definitely use it in cutscenes, but is it possible to be able to do extended assembly in order to have basic control of it (by basic, i mean left and right.)? If so, that would be AWESOME!

Also, an orderer for the weapons. Example, sometimes you have five weapons but only use two, but the'ye far apart, like the first is slot 2, and the second is slot 5. I think you should be able to move them around to make it smoother for switching weapons.

 

@Caveoholic:
It's actually not that hard with a keyboard. Then again I used to play SNES ROMs with my keyboard when I was in college, so maybe I've gotten a little too used to using a keyboard for games... I'd guess it's more fun with a good, decent controller though.

@Timmy:
That might be possible, actually. The game's images can be resized, so adding faces would be possible. Some assembly hacking might be required to add picture coordinates though, or maybe they'd be added automatically, I dunno...

@Sontreal:
I actually intend to do that at the end of my own mod, as part of the final "escape" scene. So yeah, it'd be possible. There are quite a few ways to do it, too, but they all involve modifying the motorbike entity's code. Hooking it up to the player by setting its position to the player's every frame and forcing a velocity (the game keeps track of how much force is applied to Quote, like with fans and current) would be a good start. Making it fly by forcing the UNI command and tweaking the entity is also a possibility.

Ordering weapons would actually be a bit difficult. It could be done though, weapon IDs and weapon inventory slots aren't connected; slot 1 could contain weapon 5, for instance. The interface would be the hard part.

I've recently found out how the game handles its image drawing and menu-building. The hardest part was finding the "image copy" function. With that, anyone can build a menu screen, but creating an entirely new one is a bit more complicated...

 

For your escape scene, what you could do is change Quote's sprite to one of him on the motorbike, and then simply enable whatever the game used while he is fighting the fish boss. That way you can make enemies that look like debris and force the player to dodge it as a sort of mini-game.

 

That would definitly be a cool addition to a mod.

 

Ordering weapons would actually be a bit difficult. It could be done though, weapon IDs and weapon inventory slots aren't connected; slot 1 could contain weapon 5, for instance. The interface would be the hard part.

Right, I've had an idea, which would allow both the abilty to order your weapons around, and store them in a bank of sorts. However, (Here's the best bit) I think i can do this using Sue's Workshop, and a hell of a lot of <AMJ's (Jump to event x if you have weapon y). However, I also recall there being a limit on the amount of characters you can input in a script. Though i'm not sure whether it counts as characters featuring as a part of dialog, or the complete script in general. Any confirmation will be appreciated, so I can calculate it up before doing anything.

 

@Osmose:
Unfortunately, UNI doesn't work that way. It locks the screen in place so that it won't scroll in any direction if you move towards one of the edges. Which sucks, really, because it'd be great being able to float around on a map like that. Pixel should've made it so wandering around underwater while in the air tank's bubble work that way, it would've been cool.

@Sontreal:
If you want, I can poke around and try to find the limit. There would have to be a limit of sorts, seeing as the script ends up loaded in memory, but wether it's "the amount of free RAM remaining" or a set value, I dunno at the moment.

There are a lot of things careful use of scripting could acheive. I don't think the TSC scripting engine has been exploited fully by anyone yet (though the fact only one script at a time can run is a major setback...)