Cave Story blog update - game should release in late April/May, DLC in the works…and music with lyrics?
Tyrone
Hello! I hope you missed us. Sorry for the break. There’s a reason we’ve been MIA for the last couple of weeks. No, we’re still not dead–we’re officially in crunch mode and trying our best to wrap up Cave Story! If all goes well, you’ll be playing Cave Story by the beginning of May or even end of April. Instead of a simple one-liner, we wanted to update everyone with a relatively complete item list of what we’ve been working on.
On my end, I’ve been working on finalizing the three versions of the manual. For North America, the Online Manual is required to be in English, Spanish and French. I’ve written the English version and I’m currently, slowly, translating it to spanish. Yann will be helping me with the French version. Aside from that I’ve been testing the game as much as possible and making sure we’re ready for localized versions of the game later this year.
Pixel and I have been discussing what we have in mind for DLC. We have a few new ideas that I think you’ll like. On the artwork side, I’ve been going through each file, one by one in the game making sure that the new artwork appears just way it should. We’ve pushed a pixel here or there on a few files. Oh yeah, we’ve also been translating some interviews for Pixel–you might want to keep an eye on The Escapist and Tigsource very soon.
Tiffany
You haven’t seen updates free me because I’ve been busy typing away at code. On the programming front since the last update, I have fixed up the .org player and made some additional fixes to the graphics.
Also, I’ve spent some time working on the DLC support which Ty just mentioned, making sure that the game will be able to support all the new content that we have planned over the months following the initial release.
Some bug fixes have been made and additional music and artwork have also been added. My next port of call is to focus on more DLC stuff, bug fixes and Lotcheck. In case you’re not familiar with the term Lotcheck, it’s Nintendo’s internal submission process for developers and publishers. Basically it’s just checking that we are following all of Nintendo’s protocols, providing a good framework for the downloadable content and making sure that we ship a solid and bug free game.
Yann and Nicklas
Hey, it’s Yann. Nicklas and I have been quite busy finalizing the new audio for Cave Story. First I made midi versions of the existing songs, with some modifications or new arrangements of them. All these song have been sent to Pixel for his approval; he gave us some feedback and we’ve since made the changes, as he requested.
Nicklas and I considered several ways to display the sound and finally build our own DLS bank with samples from digitally synthesized lo-fi sounds and also some old hardware sound modules. We wanted to keep them sounding a bit like chiptunes.
Then another part of the job consisting in making the sounds and the enveloppes fit with the tracks, and reorganizing the soundfont. I’m currently editing the midi files again to fix a lot of details inside the songs, making sure everything is set right, trying to improve what is lacking from Pixel’s versions, and also making some other stuff he asked for.
Oh by the way, we’re also building the speech synthesizer that will sing lyrics over each song while the playing the game!
Quelle
