Celeste sideblog

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.

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.

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.

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.