Cave Story Sound Test

Try the demo online!

This is a web reimplementation the audio engine used by Cave Story, written in TypeScript and with no external production dependencies.

Background

Cave Story (originally released as 洞窟物語 (Dōkutsu Monogatari)) is a 2004 freeware PC game developed and published by Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya of Studio Pixel and has been cited by many as being one of the core titles that ended up kickstarting what is now the modern indie game scene. You can download and play the game through the Cave Story Tribute Site.

Notably, instead of playing back plain audio files or using MIDI, Cave Story opted to use a custom audio engine for its sound effects and music, lending the game a very characteristic and distinctive retro sound. Said audio engine consists of PixTone, which synthesizes sound effects, and Organya, which plays back sequenced music. In 2018, the source code for an updated version of Organya was published to GitHub.

In early 2021, I began development on a reimplementation of the entire Cave Story game engine for the web, inspired by projects such as doukutsu-rs and the (sadly taken down) CSE2 engine. While I did manage to get some very rudimentary gameplay going, I eventually lost interest in the herculean task that would be reimplementing the entire game and decided to scope down to just focus on the audio engine, which intrigued me and presented a good opportunity to learn my way around the modern Web Audio API.

Developing and building the project

After cloning this repo, run npm install to install all dependencies necessary to develop and build the web app.

This repo does not include the proprietary Cave Story sound effect and music binary data that is required for the web app to function correctly. Instead, you must manually extract this data from the Cave Story executable to the appropriate location in src by following these steps:

1. Download the Japanese or English pre-patched version of Cave Story and extract the files.
2. Open the extracted Doukutsu.exe using 7zip or an equivalent tool and extract the contents of .rsrc/1041/WAVE and .rsrc/1041/ORG to src/data/WAVE and src/data/ORG respectively.
3. Copy ExtractPixToneParameters.ps1 from the scripts directory to the directory in which Doukutsu.exe resides and run it using PowerShell. A file named PIXTONEPARAMS will be created. Move or copy it to src/data.

To test the web app while developing, run npm run dev to start a development server on port 5173 on localhost which will watch the src directory for changes and serve the most recent version of all files.

To build a minified and optimized build, run npm run build, which will output everything to dst, ready to be published. To preview this build, run npm run preview to open a server on port 4173 on localhost.