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Cave Story Randomizer

A Cave Story mod which shuffles weapons, equipment, and upgrades. · By shru

suggestions:

A topic by rsbridge created Dec 21, 2018 Views: 592 Replies: 3
Viewing posts 1 to 3
(+2)

I played through the whole game with this randomizer, and it's relatively well done.
Of course, there were some things I thought of whilst playing it that could add to the gameplay and randomness of the experience, such as:

  1. Well, randomized EXP per weapon. (preferably like a random number of 1-100, don't want to make a level 1 polar star require like 999 EXP.) (also the highest EXP of a normal weapon is ~60 EXP anyway, wouldn't want it too unbalanced with vanilla.
  2. Make all text just go fast, or skip cutscenes. (Basically setting all text boxes to have an instant text display command on them, although, some additional tinkering of the text boxes may be required because in my experience, doing that seemed to break how the text is displayed.)
  3. Randomized text for each individual NPC, just because because that could end up being extremely silly. (although, that's a lot of text.)
  4. Logic for randomized story items, so that you can still find story items in their respective areas or otherwise, just in obtainable places if you are able to get there with the equipment given beforehand.  (e.g. : Santa's key could be in the "Execution Chamber", the tiny room with the presses and life capsule, if and only if you have a machine gun.)
Developer

Thanks for the relatively good suggestions!

1: It's not super clear to me how randomizing the weapon experience alone would enhance the gameplay. Maybe something like scaling weapon stats around the point in the game when they're acquired would be interesting... ie. Maybe you'd get a powered-down version of the Snake in the Hermit Gunsmith's chest, then later on in the Plantation you might find an Uber Bubbline. Something like that.

2: Acquiring items has a scripted wait period (so that you can hear the Item/Capsule Get melody), I could add an option to disable those waits.

3: That kind of stuff is always fun, and I'm a fan of silly random text generators. But I'll probably work on things that affect gameplay first.

4: Randomizing story items is definitely something I'll throw in eventually. Having the locations be aware of whether or not you have the Machine Gun or Booster is a very cool idea.

Thinking back on this topic, it occurs to me that EXP data is not kept in the data folders, and instead is stored in the actual EXE of the game itself. So, that would require some additional additions of some kind. Upgradable weapons sound kind of cool, though with randomized EXP it would be either more of a blessing or a curse type of scenario, where you have no idea whether you can level up the weapon quickly, or if it will take forever, making life a lot harder.

Also: randomized booster v0.8 and v2.0 locations would be cool, except that would mean you'd have to remove all of the flags that connect to things like: the bad ending, whether or not you get into the v2.0 version of the last cave, or so Booster doesn't die meaning that Booster appears in the teleporter possibly giving another randomized item, and so on and so forth. Basically any point in the game where it checks for either one of the boosters, or a flag that was activated upon collecting the booster v0.8.

Shuffling key items would definitely add a lot of depth to the gameplay, and skipping cutscenes would be really good.

What about letting the player teleport to Egg Corridor, Bushlands and Sand Zone from the start?