One of my favorite games is Celeste! One of, if not The Best 2d Platformer of all time. From the ART to the CONTROLS, the MUSIC and SOUND EFFECTS and the atmosphere / emotion that it all drives from you. The game keeps such a simple scope; just get to the end of the stage while avoiding the obstacles and completing the thrilling jumps. The game slowly introduces new features and mechanics that always keep the game interesting. You quickly are shown your dash ability and are slowly shown new mechanics like moving platforms, platforms that move when you grab onto them, those platforms can propel you if you let go at the last second, orbs that replenish your dash, Etc. The game truly never gets old. The game honestly doesn’t really do anything new, it just does everything right!

There is a lot that we can learn from Celeste as Game Developers. Keeping a small scope, remixing one idea into several new ones for more content with less work, along with lots and lots more. When game developing often if I’m stumped I will take a break any play some other games and when I come back I’m always rushing with ideas. Recently I have been more focused on the Art aspect, I’ve always been fascinated with pixel art but never really took the time to get good at it. EXCEPT FOR NOW!

This is my Celeste Inspired Tile Set & Background

Along with my reference:

I’d have to say I’m very proud of myself so far. Maybe it doesn’t look amazing or perfect up next to the reference, but for my first actual attempt at making something good, I am happy with it! I did run into a lot of problems trying to make sure it was perfect for autotiling there were a lot of cases that there could be that I only found out through trial and error, but with that tile set you can draw any shape or level your heart desires!

Now this was all cool and all, I was super happy… but I wanted to make something more. I thought about creating my own Original Character in the Celeste style. I knew this one was going to be fun, so I got to work instantly. Likewise, I started with drawing Madeline (The main character in Celeste) to get a good feel for the style of the characters. Then, I opened a new Aseprite file and started working on my Original Character (which I modeled after myself…), after about half of an hour I was so unbelievably proud of what I made!

He’s even got my mullet!

Purple shirt since that’s my favorite color

completed with Blue Jeans, As that is what I wear in real life often!

I am so happy with this!

Now, this is such a cool feeling… BEING IN MY FAVORITE GAME! Kind’ve a childhood dream, honestly! Well actually… I’m not in Celeste. I just have a sprite of me in Celeste. Before I can be in Celeste, I need to ANIMATE him! Animating pixel art is actually one of my favorite things to do ever so I won’t have any issues with that, it may take a while tho…

I honestly can’t believe myself here, I really outdid myself if I do say so myself! The only thing I don’t like is that the running animation is a little choppy, however I am okay with that considering the hours I spent on it and without any references honestly, I just kept trying things and seeing what looked good and what didn’t, because of that I learned a lot! I originally didn’t have one of the hands going behind the sprite in the run animation, and when I realized that it made a huge difference! For the crouch animation, you can tell I have fun with it and took some inspiration from Toby Fox if you can tell… I’ve been playing deltarune. However, back on topic, The only thing really left here is to drop it all into Celeste, make some levels and try to copy the controls. And………

It all came out really well! So far the spikes don’t do damage and it’s all pretty bare bones. I did add a dash mechanic, despite not having an animation for it currently. I had a lot of fun replicating the way that Celeste handles switching between stages. My solution was to give a camera to each stage and keep a camera index and increase it every time you reach a transition zone. It also spawns in a transition camera temporarily that lerps between camera 1 and camera 2 and freezes time, then it boots the player up and resumes time. Pretty simple and effective.

I had a lot of fun with this project and writing this blog post, so I hope you enjoyed reading it and I hope that I inspired you! GO CREATE COOL THINGS!