Welcome to Cave Tale!

Cave Tale is... Well, it's a fan comic for a video game called Cave Story. I made the comic for a little bit back in middle school, and it was hosted on a website called SmackJeeves, which was at the time a platform that let anyone create a webcomic about anything. (SmackJeeves developed a reputation for mostly being male/male romance comics of dubious quality, but it had a strong community for fan comics and original content too.) SmackJeeves changed ownership a couple times, before select comics were pulled to be monetized in an app, and the website itself and all the comics it hosted besides those select few were taken down, putting an end to one of the simpler means of making an amateur web comic.

Cave Tale might not read very well at first; It's a "sprite comic," a comic made by compiling scenes from game assets with characters depicted using frames from character animations from those games. The character sprites here are edited into original characters, but the original game and the original sprites are fairly low resolution and hard to fit detail into.

I didn't really know what I was doing at the time, but I appreciate the ambition I had going into the project. It's been hard for me to devote myself to a project like this since then, as much as I've been wanting to. So, here's me sharing this glimpse into my past.

The comic might not make a lot of sense if you haven't played Cave Story. Cave Story was a freeware game following the adventure of Quote, an amnesiac who wakes up in a mysterious cave system somewhere called The Island. You can get the game for free here, which is the version the comic's sprites are based on, or pay for a visually improved version of the game with more detailed sprites here. Though, the best version might be the Nintendo Switch version, which adds the ability to play with a friend and a few other quality-of-life improvements, provided you have a Nintendo Switch to play it on.