So on the Cave Story fansite one of the admins decided to start a collaborative effort towards a fan-made sequel to Cave Story. Guess what I immediately volunteered to do?

Uh, a lot of these will have to be links since they're bitmap... It's cuz the original Cave Story engine uses renamed, indexed color bitmaps for its graphics (the indexed color makes the filesize a ton smaller than a normal bitmap) so I've gotten into the habit of saving CS-based graphics as bitmap. Dunno if that's what the new engine's going to be using (it's not a [gosh that word filter is annoying] modIFICATION, they're gonna write a new engine that will emulate the feel of CS but have new and different features) but it's how I've gotten into the habit of doing it, so...

This is the first thing I did. The idea I had was to make something as grotesque and macabre as possible. The below is not the full spritesheet, and I tweaked the mouth open sprite a bit for the final sheet, but this one shows the full sprite with mouth/eyes open and closed.

Here's the full spritesheet laid out in the same way as the Core sheet from CS; it can be renamed to a .pbm, hex editted to include the "©Pixel" tag at the end, and substituted for the original "NpcAlmo2.pbm" sheet in the Cave Story data/NPC folder. That's how I tested out the sheet.

Here's a tileset. It's not finished.

Here's a background. It's meant to tile.

This is a screenshot of the above tileset, background, and sprite working together. I made the room to only be a graphics test; that's why I gave myself 106 HP.

Screenshot 2

Screenshot 3

And now, facepics! The portraits used in the dialogue boxes of the game. This one's a GIF, dunno why I saved it that way.

One of the characters we're planning to include is Sue, except she's human again and now a teenager. This was drawn from scratch but I referenced an unused portrait of human Sue from the face.pbm file in the original Cave Story data folder, as well as a sprite of teenager Sue that someone else did (mostly for the hairstyle, although you can't see her ponytail in the portrait anyway). This uses mostly the original palette of face.pbm except for one color in Sue's skin tone, since I thought the original looked a little greenish so I moved it a bit closer to orange on the hue selector. Oh yeah, and I had to define a new color for the inside of her mouth, since the gray-pink used in face.pbm wasn't dark enough.

Oh, and here is the young human Sue portrait that Pixel created but never used in Cave Story.

Haha, the beginning of a project is the only time I'm productive. May as well try to turn out some more graphics before I become unproductive again.