love celeste modding as a medium but hate it as a genre
like celeste and hate the celeste community
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@celestemodder69
love celeste modding as a medium but hate it as a genre
like celeste and hate the celeste community

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Luckily using the word temple to describe a building that is spooky or hostile while completely disregarding weather it's actually a place of worship is a politically neutral decision with no implications of significance
doing petit bourgeois aspirationism with celeste mods is crazy work
Genuinely full of level designers that don't conceive of it as a game
The design paradigms people most use when making celeste maps tend to really favor higher difficulties in my opinion and in the more extreme cases accessible difficulty is at odds with the design goals, how much you can push your goals is a matter of how hard you are willing/capable of raising the difficulty.
And as a player I do sometimes feel that how high I can reach is a matter of how much I am missing out on. That, generally, the more fulfilled a map is, the higher its difficulty will be and the further I am from being allowed to play it.
The expected proficiency is so high that a lot of the driving factors of the "beginner" player's game experience have been completely forgotten.
A starting player can not intuit madeline's movement seconds into the future, they are nearly always reacting to the player movement, they have to remind themselves which button does what, the only thing they know about the player's jump arc is that it goes up, coordination is a big issue.
They don't have an intuition or understanding of the details of the mechanics, they barely know what any given thing does beyond it's base functionality, every new level is a set of mechanics that they are trying to wrap their head around and every bit of knowledge about these mechanics is just a hypothesis that has failed to be disproven yet, tens of hours in most will not confidently know how respawning works beyond the necessary intuition because at no point was it necessary for them to formalize this knowledge, they can't just "read a room".
This is normal for a game, this is the typical design space for most devs and modders in most games work with, it is where the majority of players spend most of their time. But somehow in celeste we have the gall to call something of 7c's difficulty "easy" fully straightfaced.
I feel that a lot of these factors are seen as obstacles to playing the game instead of part of the game itself and just another context to design for.

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The design paradigms people most use when making celeste maps tend to really favor higher difficulties in my opinion and in the more extreme cases accessible difficulty is at odds with the design goals, how much you can push your goals is a matter of how hard you are willing/capable of raising the difficulty.
And as a player I do sometimes feel that how high I can reach is a matter of how much I am missing out on. That, generally, the more fulfilled a map is, the higher its difficulty will be and the further I am from being allowed to play it.
At first one would think that art can be evaluated in a myriad of different ways, that for any given piece one can find its meaning to be in any combination of the things it could strive to do and you could find its significance by applying it in any number of contexts.
This, of course, is false. The only important metric that art can be judged by and the one that determines its worth is how wide is its appeal in the context of the gringo consumer market.
Can it be effectively consumed as a product? Is it in English? Can it be applied to the yank's life in some way? If the answer is no to any of these its basically worthless.
And you may think "But celestemodder69, how can this evaluation be applied when not every piece of art is subject to the usamerican commodity market? What about celeste mods?", but fear not there is a surefire way to apply this evaluation.
You want to find the most individualistic self-centered dipshit gringo liberal consumer you can find and they will graciously inform you, without the need to ask the question, that their opinion is fact about the worth of a given piece of art. Thank god for these people, otherwise we would never have known.
I do love that when making hard levels evaluating a design choice often comes down to:
cons: the player will hate me for it
pros: it's in-keeping with the levels design goals
And its a choice so easy it makes itself.
There is this individualistic speudomythic idea within western and especially anglophone and yank centric spaces of the genius individual who revolutionizes a field without ever touching the history of work that came before them, not as a learned specialist but as a born genius [insert here reference to the american dream and its exceptionalizing rhetoric].
The specter of this figure haunts these spaces and you will see it easiest when people talk about success.
When someone does "well" you don't complement their experience or even their capability to do "well", you say "they are very talented", it is understood to necessarily be innate.
When someone expands the field you don't complement their understanding of it and their flexibility to thereby act within it, you say "this is very creative", as if the idea came from the ether.
There is a willing and constant process in obfuscating the process of creation and development of ideas within the field in trying to keep the idea of this figure alive.
Watching back Patricia Taxxon's video on spring collab 2020 I don't think I've seen since (in the context of modded celeste) a video that engaged with the material in such a thorough, design conscious and artistically focused way.
I would have loved to hear her thoughts on a lot of contemporary maps.

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Celeste tech is by enlarge incredibly janky, tight and intuitively arbitrary, it is counter to desired design nigh universally.
This is often forgotten or denied because the community has built itself around it and accommodated itself to it like a tree growing around a boulder.
There is not a single tech in the game that would not benefit from leniency mechanics, minimal predictability (cb or ultras especially) and proper player feedback.
Nevermind actually putting in design work into determining what kind of tech like mechanics would be beneficial for the game in the first place.
It is true that these techs have a characteristic functionality and building on top of them will let you achieve unique game experiences, but you must not lose sight of the fact that you are working against them as much as you are with them. And there will no doubt be much better suited potential manifestations of these techs that you could achieve if you actually got to design them.
Remember that you are suiting your needs to the tech, not the other way around.
Celeste tech is by enlarge incredibly janky, tight and intuitively arbitrary, it is counter to desired design nigh universally.
This is often forgotten or denied because the community has built itself around it and accommodated itself to it like a tree growing around a boulder.
There is not a single tech in the game that would not benefit from leniency mechanics, minimal predictability (cb or ultras especially) and proper player feedback.
Nevermind actually putting in design work into determining what kind of tech like mechanics would be beneficial for the game in the first place.
Players really do start spouting nonsense when they get pissed off huh
Stealing an idea and other such magical thinking.
As a general rule I've found that the more interesting a map is the more people will performatively hate it, a la 'i hate maths' or 'i hate vegetables' with about the same level of rigor. I cannot but conclude that I am still to make a map that is interesting enough.
I must make the next waterbite, 4:33 or election d and i will take every single insult as a compliment, one more meaningful and self-demonstrating that whatever garbage these people could come up with if they actually tried. Because if they actually laid bare what it is that they value within maps and complemented mine for it I would feel shame, disgust and nothing else.

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modern celeste gameplay is hyperspecialized to a very arbitrary set of standards that's divorced from the celeste engine's actual strengths.
i think what celeste is good for is that it provides the player a highly expressive / adaptable moveset, which requires a good sense of space to use well. combined with how relatively easy it is to make appealing visuals in celeste and the adaptive music tools that fmod offers, i would a priori hope to see most mods heavily prioritize atmosphere and the kind of improvisation and spatial awareness that characterizes the vanilla a sides, which all together would be really powerful at evoking a vivid sense of place.
instead, we see very abstracted gameplay where people basically design a linear obstacle course for madeline, sometimes with the added twist that we must figure out in what order to do the obstacles.
setting, aesthetic, and narrative if present become very superficial and have no connection to the gameplay.
I'm going to discuss the setting/deco and maybe narrative aspects first since they're going to be simpler and do gameplay at another time. Starting with setting there are two major factors that come to mind which are relevant here.
1. Recycling parts: Although it is true that Everest/Lönn has the programing groundwork already put in to construct a cohesive environment of a certain kind. The individual elements for this system still have to be made, and will generally have to be made for purpose, meaning a pixel artist/composer/trained "specialist" of some kind has to coordinate with mappers to make this happen.
Essentially, the reason why the asset drive is not a replacement for this work is similar to why the asset store has not been a replacement for a trained artist in a dev team. You can sometimes source generic elements to it but not much more and to create a non generic environment purpose-built elements are a must unless you are making a collage map. Plus a lot of these "generic" elements have their own styles distinct from the base game, are of subpar quality, are the wrong size, clash with the map composition or each other and can have any other design decision that makes them inappropriate for a particular context or may not even exist. So from the moment you plan to implement any stylistic decision making, you need to have already planned what specific elements you are gonna be using. And the moment you plan to have custom entity textures you might as well design the map aesthetic around them, any custom visual effects are, of course, out of the question.
In terms of music it's a different story, mainly because of two tools 1.a vast library of ready made music from a variety of sources 2.copyright infringement. Unlike most visual elements which are heavily restricted by their format and availability, songs and specially songs from other videogames can usually fill the need for music pretty well, since there's usually no requirements for specifics in the same way, to the point where you can relatively comfortably leave music for later if you have a big enough library to pull from. With the caveat that custom music will almost always fit better and can actually utilize certain adaptive music systems (particularly the music layers)(also cassette blocks). Additionally, the particularities of the community's opinions on the matter of art ownership generally work such that nearly all practically available music can be used in a way that wouldn't work out with most visual equivalents or even most elements from other celeste mods (including some in the asset drive, which also impedes its usage).
In conclusion, although the audio is generally workable, in terms of visual design the engine nor the current production process of most mappers facilitate the creation of custom game environments in my opinion. And given that most modded celeste mechanics are of the base game or derivations of them, to have this environment be meaningfully impactful to the player experience in its own terms (practically untethered to the environments of the base game) in a mainly mechanics focused engine is a much greater ask still. Meaning, the mechanics accompany this sentiment.
Collabs and team focused projects can and do avoid this to a much greater degree (as do mappers with a background in art production to some extent, a few come to mind) but I'm choosing not to address this cause it's not the norm and this is getting long enough.
2. The audience in question: Vanilla celeste is very much a gameplay focused game. The story is built around the gameplay and is gameplay driven, the deco and music* were built to furnish the gameplay audio-visually and the moment to moment game experience is mechanically focused gameplay. Add the fact that gaming culture as a whole tends to be very focused on games as intrinsically focused tests of mechanical execution (see The Witness speedruns existing) and you get an audience whose main goal is to make celeste maps, here meaning celeste gameplay.
I very much don't think this audience has gotten the wrong idea about what Everest is and will allow them, the popularity of celeste within gaming culture generally is very much a consequence of it genuinely being a certain kind of intrinsically focused test of mechanical execution. So, ultimately, regardless of the specifics of how this gameplay driven design is carried out to frame it in such a manner is the logical conclusion of what celeste/Everest encourages in my opinion. The difference in environmental design/this sense of place mainly coming down to, beside the fact that it isn't the main focus for most, a lack of supplied tools in most contexts of mapping production.
I also want to make note of the fact that once a kind of design focus has been established it carries with it inertia within the community. Because it conditions audience expectation, because it's easier to build upon something that's already there, because it draws more people in who are interested in making more things like it, because more tool are built with it in mind etc.
*I remember that in an interview or devlog it was said that for level 4 golden ridge the tone of the music did significantly affect aspect of its level design, although this was an exception.
I have an enormous respect for Waterbite and it's design.
On the bigger scale design it's not too groundbreaking, the rooms and map structure are almost all linear and the goal of the player is to repeatedly attempt a set gameplay until they have overcome it and hence put it behind them, knowing that there are step by step coming closer to a set ending, the macro-structure of the map is more or less what you'd get from most maps, this is very much not the design focus of the map.
Within this pretty common design space ZaharRRQ creates a gameplay landscape that completely transforms the way you engage with the game, it's still a test of skill but the skills being engaged with are completely different to your average celeste map. It's a test of patience, memory, dedication and of precision in a completely different way than the rest of celeste modding (or all of gaming for that matter), it completely transforms the way in which you engage with the game without ever abstracting its gamespace and mechanics (it's no minigame, it's not about superseding the celeste engine).
The other thing that stands out about the map is it's size, it stands at a scale where it won't let you just call it a one off or a gimmick. This is not a map made for those that have a passing interest in dashless precision water gameplay, there exists no person for who this will be a minor thing. Further, this makes it so that eventually you will be left "floating" (pardon the pun), too far from the beginning to look back, to far from the end to look forward, in front of you is a path that may as well be infinite, now walk. There are the different checkpoints sure, but at some point you really just have to exist in the moment, the whole thing is too slow and protracted to engage otherwise.
As a whole, it's an extended methodical push, within gaming the closest examples of this kind of engagement and mindset are probably those "chore" games like powerwash simulator, viscera cleanup detail or death stranding, or "rage" games like getting over it where sooner or later you have to make peace with the fact that every step you take can and will be lost, so you can't form the expectation of immediate (significant) progress. Still none(ish) of these are of the difficulty and player hostility of Waterbite (and the ones that are, usually "rage games", handle failure states in a completely separate way that is integral to their hostility, if getting over it had checkpoints it would hardly be the same game).
To me Waterbite is a game experience unique not just to celeste modding, but to gaming as a whole.