open letter to any celeste people go install everest and then go download strawberry jam if your computer can handle it which it most likely can. i think objectively the best mod in many ways just based on its diversity and breadth of skill. not necessarily like "top ten rooms ever" but overall it just works so well. over 8 hours of original music, 5 difficulties (6 really cuz the crackeds and gmhs go above for sure), over 350 contributors and over 110 individual levels. its like the quintessential mod now. and when ur done do 100trap golden to hate celeste again
vbyss is good, 7d1d is always a classic, spring collab is cool to get back to, but sj takes it full ladders higher than the few rungs of sc and others imo. solar express might be my favourite map ever but like theo gp is fun to me somehow. anyway im gonna get back to expert silvers maybe ill hate it like a normal person by then :3
good luck to anyone who gets it, i promise its worth it to play it through to the end. if you dont know how to set up mods go to clord.
if you havent done all vanilla chapters definitely do that first though dont just be like "hey guys i did 4b 5b was too hard so im going to try some mods yay yay yay" you will waste your time. be patient with basegame, then go wild with mods
this was kinda a dumb post but like i wanted to say smth abt sj just cuz its so amazing and like wild that it exists or that so many people would come together to make something like this. ill post dumb stuff abt it later maybe idk i havent opened tumblr in like 3 months until today
I think I have to hard disagree on the idea that difficulty implies linearity. And I'm specifically talking about Celeste mods. In my experience, having ten solutions to one problem doesn't make a map less difficult if all ten solutions are equally bullshit. The actual problem with balancing difficulty and linearity is that when you design a level with so many potential solutions, you have to make every solution roughly even in execution. Or at the very least, you want to account for the various potential approaches in balancing them. Which just makes designing rooms so much harder.
Generally when designing difficulty, I like to either make something that someone could probably pick up immediately after Chapter 9 or something that I personally can barely beat. So, in more common terms, it has to either be Intermediate, low Advanced, or Cracked GM.
But I've been experimenting recently with making cracked GM stuff where the player is offered multiple approaches and it's absolutely possible. Maybe that's because I really like working with Spike Jumps and Corner Tech, which inherently expand options and make you rethink how you interact with common obstacles, while I hate working with Ultras because they're the exact opposite of that.
I made this as a proof of concept for a bullet hell corner spam hybrid and currently all of these solutions except for the last one are usable and similar difficulty. It all comes down to personal preference.
And this is what the completed screen looks like. Some of the difficulty comes from the corner tech, some comes from the player needing to manage the infinitely spawning homing missiles, some comes from the player having to make decisions and execute shit while under pressure, and some comes from the lack of a single clear solution to any given segment. At some point the player gets such a huge catalogue of options that asking them to perform clearly signaled tech quits being challenging compared to asking them to filter through their options to find the correct one.
Or here's another map I'm working on. The badeline fight is a massive spike in difficulty specifically because the solutions are open ended and combined with having to manage resources, being trapped in a closed in environment without a lot of options to manuever around Badeline chasers, and the heightened pacing, these two rooms are easily a difficulty spike despite the previous rooms using more complex tech. In fact, more than half of my time getting the recording for this was me trying to beat the final screen.
Think of it like this, if the player can afford to put 100% of their attention on executing a tech, then it's easier than if they have to divide their attention. And that division can come from psychological pressure like "is this really the best solution?" or "I need to keep track of the shit chasing me while also doing this thing." Plus, I think open ended shit is more exciting to see run by speedrunners, TAS, and Goldens because part of it is just going "how will they go about it?"
I'm working on a skin mod for Celeste where you play as A. Half the reason is so that I can call it "A Xenoblade Mod" and write the description as "Now you can play as the Xenoblade. Phenominal."
I had to make a level for A. So, the earth is cutely getting sucked into a Black Hole while you do platforming in space. The main gimmick is that there are three gravity fields. Green fields send you upwards like in Floating Point, Purple Fields make gravity stronger, and Crimson fields disable gravity. Also, there are portals and some refills that give you superdash. I'm sticking it in a map pack with a bunch of corner spam maps. I think it would be funny if the destruction of the universe was a Green difficulty map. It's mostly just a nyoom map mimicking some maps I liked from SJ.
What really burns my ass about the Celeste modding community being obsessed with execution of janky glitch tech as the sole legitimate measure of difficulty and concomitantly having zero respect for puzzles is that the Super Mario romhacking community is turning out these amazing puzzle levels that are being played competitively at GDQ events and such, in spite of the fact that Super Mario isn't even a puzzle-centric game, while Celeste, which very much is a puzzle-centric game, is basically entirely absent from that scene.