ricky06

YouTube video by ricky06 What is "Readability" in Celeste Mods?

I love this video essay by @ricky-06.bsky.social where a long-time Celeste modder thinks deeply about platformer level design and explores the nuances of the form youtu.be/PscIXRdEN7I?...

!! Thanks so much for the shoutout Maddy! This definitely wasn't on my 2025 bingo card LOL

YouTube video by ricky06 What is "Readability" in Celeste Mods?

hello i made a celeste video essay. i hope you enjoy the ramblings
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PscI...

Bernadette [Celeste] [Mods] You and me, in our playhouse...... A Celeste (CELESTE) Mod in the Collab/Contest category, submitted by ricky06

i suppose i'll post new projects here as well 😁 this is a small map i made for music translation contest 3. it's relatively accessible, high int/low adv difficulty. ft funny cycles gp and an absolute banger of a song. go listen to it. let it consume you. join my cult 😈

gamebanana.com/mods/592461

An artwork featuring Madeline, a character from Celeste, enjoying a game of golf.

Par for the Course ⛳️ Breeze Contest (Celeste mod)

you were so close.... i'll give a consolation pat for the effort

and thats it! this was really fun--i may try and do some stuff like this with my other maps in the future. i have a youtube channel where i make video essays but those are time consuming, and sometimes when i just want to ramble about small stuff this might be the perfect platform for that :)

that being said, I still want to make an easier map at some point. I feel like my resume has slowly shifted towards higher difficulties targeted for experienced players, but I also love accessibility. perhaps it's time to do some introspection...back to the conqueror's peak days...

In that sense, it's not my proudest work--but it's still one I'm quite happy with. I think it's also why the reception has been so positive. Ultimately, it's a polished map with a lot of my mapping quirks, with a sweet spot difficulty for modded players: tricky, but not brutally punishing.

MY OVERALL THOUGHTS! I think...this is a very "safe" map. I didn't venture too far out in any particular category, and pretty much stuck to my comfort zone. this is fully intentional, as the original goal is to fit into a larger mappack. not my magnum opus, or some extravagant gift.

also yes, these are all of my maps that I've made (not including collabs). if you can name all of them correctly, you'll get +10 ricky points and a pat on the back

the spinners were inspired by these cubes from Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded. I haven't played this game. I don't know what these things are. I also don't love the way they look in the final map--it feels noisy. i do like that it stands out though. readability issues from deco can be hard to deal with.

idk how successful i actually was in conveying this idea, but it was still fun to map around! in a way, it also reflects two extremes of how i approach gameplay, a balance between conscious player decision and pure cinematic flare. the style won't vibe with everyone, but i'm glad i tried it :)

I did this primarily as an experimental way to connect gameplay with worldbuilding. the first half of the level is unrestricted, without rules or governance. as you go higher up, the world begins to take more control of your autonomy--a fun play on the idea of a dystopian world.

woahhhh wtf is happening

the final piece of this was the reveal that the bombs (fishes) can activate the switches as well, completing a full transformation to the rube goldberg machine style rooms you see in the final checkpoint.

As the level proceeds, I allow more "contraptions" to begin appearing. you hit a switch, but it's not obvious what it did, almost like you're losing control of the player as the level starts moving around you, guiding you through.

one conscious design choice I made throughout this level was to make the gameplay feel more and more "automated" as the level goes on. at first, your moves are very intentional. madeline is the one hitting the switches, moving the things out of her way, and helping herself get past the obstacles.

also, the guy hologram is NOT donker19, although I think it's a really funny connection that I only made after people pointed it out. the fact that donk released The Nexus, a word that appears a lot in this map makes it even more funny of a coincidence.

the hologram voices are done by me and my girlfriend. she has never done anything even remotely related to voice acting and was very self conscious of her voice, even though i thought it sounded amazing. please give her some love <3

so when i was re-making the map, a lot of rooms were "separated." i fleshed out concepts more gradually throughout the much longer map, which really helped the pacing i think. I believe only 3-4 rooms of the OG made it to the final version (mainly tutorials), which is pretty crazy to see.

here's a little tease of what one of the original rooms looked like. I think there's some cool ideas for sure, but overall it's quite unfocused and demands a lot in a single room, making it quite a bit less accessible for casual players.

so! i ended up mushing a bunch of different ideas together in each room as a workaround. ultimately I think the map ended up feeling "incomplete" despite being one of the longer maps. idea were half explored, concepts were hinted at but not well taught, and overall the pacing felt rushed.

gameplaywise most of the original rooms were scrapped. a limitation of the collab was to keep the length reasonable, similar to SJ itself. this meant I only had about 10 rooms to work with, and with how much I wanted to explore the mechanics, it was very difficult to keep it under that limit.

in terms of deco, my original vision was a hyper light drifter inspired world, creating a kind of dissonance between natural terrain and man-made technology. ultimately this idea was scrapped, not because it's bad, but I couldn't make it feel cohesive. maybe i'll explore it again in the future :)

as mentioned in the description, the map was originally part of an SJ DLC project that was cancelled. it was also completely different! this is a screenshot of the very WIP visuals at the time.

City of Broken Dreams [Celeste] [Mods] Madeline finds herself amidst a dystopian world, where the line that divides dream and reality is all but an illusion...... A Celeste (CELESTE) Mod in the Standalone category, submitted by ricky06

I have decided: this platform my rambling journal! so here's a thread about some interesting devlog tidbits for city of broken dreams, a celeste mod I released recently. you can check it out here: gamebanana.com/mods/581387

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