Cave Story thoughts + Memories.

The piece of fiction I was working on ended up becoming quite long by the end of the week!
I've decided that instead of uploading it all as one piece of content, I'm going to continue to chip away at it and transform it into a short story rather than something simple like five pages of Things Happening.

   Cave Story, or “Doukutsu Monogatari” was released in 2004, and translated some time later into english.
My relationship with Cave Story is a pretty important one – maybe more than Super Metroid and at least as much as a vidoegame can be responsible, it's probably the most influental game that relates to me I can name.
If you aren't familiar with Cave Story (how does the underside of that rock look) it's arguably the game that started the “Colorful 2D platformer” trend when it comes to independent games.
   Cave Story has influenced me as an artist and kind of an aspiring developer. (Keep a look out for that!)
Under the surface of an explorative platformer is a game that's not just a loving homage to retro titles, but also an example of how limitations – self imposed or technological, can strengthen development.
If you want an example of an incredibly famous game doing it, this is Fumito Ueda's entire design philosophy.
   Fumito Ueda was the Director of Shadow of the Colossus, which underwent massive changes during development until it was restrained to its most basic necessary elements.
Cave Story may not appear like this initially, but everything in Cave Story is essential.
   Even if we examine it simply, just looking at one element a time, this observation holds up.

Cave Story looks like a retro game but every pixel that, well, Pixel, the Director uses in the game is entirely essential. Nothing is spared on superfluous animation or characterization. Characters have portraits with few expressions but those expressions are always well used to reinforce simple dialogue.
   In a way, it's the exact opposite of the most recent Metroid game, despite being structured like the best entries in the series. Cave Story imparted a pretty important lesson the first time I played it that has everything to do with games I like and even games I’ve planned or helped design over the years.
Less is more, and even if something seems absolutely wonderful and cool, it's always important to examine your work from a position of imagining it missing what might make it 'whole' Cave Story is an awesome rad game, even if it's been remade several times over the last few years, each remake kind of...distracting from what made the original game so wonderful.
   The Wii release has “SUPER HD GRAPHICS” which still look absolutely wonderful, but jar with the revamped sounds and music. The 3DS release is maybe the most pointless at all. Cave Story is inherently a game that works for any portable system and any length of play, but the game was completely remade to have 3D graphics that look pretty sub-par to the pixel art of the original release.
   Even though Pixel directed this remake – I think it's misguided and sort of misses the point of the original. Maybe we're just, as people who enjoy videogames, infatuated with remakes. I don't think there's a game that's necessarily undeserving of one , but c'mon, Cave Story? The game is meticulously planned out. Every detail is completely necessary and thought for.
   This all might seem kind of glowing and it really is, but Cave Story is still a pretty important game and I don't think developers have learned as much as they can from Pixel.
   That's the problem with it, too. The game isn't labyrinthine by any means yet what I see other developers take away from it can be simplified as “Metroid-style games can be popular.” and “Pixel art can be cute.” My first time playing the game was shortly after the initial translation and I remember it pretty well - at the time I was at a place that was once a stellar community for amateur pixelartists but is now more of a trainwreck and echo chamber for the few talented artists left.
   Cave Story was a lot of things to young developers when it started, I think. Tons of us overestimated the talent required to make it and saw the game as an example of what one person could do.
At the time, 'making a game in five years' probably didn't seem like that much of a chore. A lot of projects that were massive in size started popping up, not a single one of them ever came to fruition. I even worked on a couple of them.
   The majority of the failures were just from overreaching, too. We were all completely amateur with nothing under our belt, and every project that got started had to be the 'next' Cave Story. Some people were so discouraged that after multiple failures they completely abandoned the community. I'm sure some of them don't even do art anymore, let alone pixel-art. Striking out on your own as a developer will do that to you.
   Now it's ten years gone, and few of my friends have made their own titles - almost none of them are people that I knew back then. Cave Story imparted maybe it's most important lesson: No matter how simple the graphics or game seems, developing something 'good' is a challenge. Cave Story's true labriynth isn't the island, it's development itself.