tobyaaa

T-Minus Mod for Celeste | Celeste Mods Better Hurry Up... A Celeste (CELESTE) Mod in the Standalone category, submitted by tobyaaa

only took me like 3 years but my second really-big map is finally done! Play it if you have longing nostalgia for the feeling of stress you get during a big exam
gamebanana.com/mods/628864

Thank you very much!

I've no idea how other games (eg. SMW) have handled this but I think there's a chance it'll always be just a little easier to find/FMOD an arbitrary song yourself than get someone to make a cover of it for celeste... a section of the Asset Drive for audio is an appealing idea either way though

this is fantastic!! Thanks so much!
(fun fact I have every part of this puzzle memorized except the 4th and 6th colors)

No Answer Mod for Celeste | Celeste Mods ...find anything?... Download the No Answer Mod for Celeste. Customize your gameplay with this fan-made Celeste Mod by tobyaaa in the Standalone category,

A bit back, abuffzucchini and I were chatting about how to do an Music Translation map of Solar Fields' No Answer. Zucchini's idea released a while ago, but here's mine!

gamebanana.com/mods/600953
I hope you enjoy! It's a bit of a strange one.

I finally put out a new Celeste mod! This is an effort to be more creative and less restrictive, reminding myself why I love making maps. Here are two of my favorite rooms, or watch and download the whole thing on the mod page!
gamebanana.com/mods/598635

It's been so long since this mechanic came out, it's incredibly underused

can we get some cooking tips

ABS Submersible Pump Installation and Operation [Celeste] [Mods] We know how water works!... A Celeste (CELESTE) Mod in the Collab/Contest category, submitted by BossSauce

forgot to post this here, me and @bosssauce.bsky.social made an Music Translation map! Since the contest requires submissions to have the same title as the relevant song, we naturally chose a song no one knows the name of. I think the map turned out really well!
gamebanana.com/mods/592788

I do find this really interesting actually since Celeste doesn't render more than >128ish onscreen lights at once and allegedly sometimes less? It's still usually way more than enough but I wonder if the technique got altered at some point

!!!

I think the biggest takeaway I have from this level is that this sort of “cryptic” puzzle should always try to be as friendly & easy as it can. I’m not kidding that EVERY puzzle in this level was harder at some point in development, but very little was lost in making any of them simpler.

A tree with several orange flowers below it, and some red flowers to the left of it. There's a patch of purple flowers hanging to its right.

I felt the need to sprite an additional flower color, as well as hanging flowers, since I wanted to draw attention away from the purple lilac. The flowers are also often grouped into similar colors, because that also makes the groups of purple fit in more.

a bunch of spooooky's trees in various colors and a set of birch trees in a gradient.

The trees all belong to spooooky; for each one I spirited 3 or 4 variants with more yellow/orange leaves. Each tree in the level is one decal with 5 flag decals on top of it, and there are savefile-persistent flags set to progress as the player hits certain milestones.

A room with 4 tree decals, maybe 8 tiny flowers, 1 painting, and little other decoration.

I've heard that the level is a bit under-decorated. This is true; I underscoped decoration since I was so worried about getting the trees to change color as you progress through the level. In the end, partially thanks to lonn layers (a lifesaver) it was easier than I expected.

A room full of yellowing birch trees

I consider fall to be one of the most difficult aesthetics to nail in a celeste level; nothing ever really matches going outside in the fall and staring in awe at individual trees (yes I do this). I don’t think this level succeeds either, but I do think specific parts capture some aspect of it.

The vertical room with the variant. This is the specific section that was way too hard.

There also used to be a challenge with the extended variant “lava/ice everywhere” (it swaps when you dash, it’s super cool and very underused). It was a fun twist but it made the vertical room way too hard (and playtesters noted that it ruined the atmosphere).

The room to the left of the well (I like calling this room "the epilogue room")

Early on I came up with the idea of having a knowledge check in the form of doing part of the map grabless, instead of a dash code. I loved this idea of imposing challenges on gameplay you’ve done many times (kind of like the Forgotten unlock in TBoI), so I did it a bunch in the level.

I knew from KTaNE that if the SFX puzzle’s message was too long, it’d be annoying; but too fast, it’d be hard to parse the morse. I shortened the message from FIND LAVENDER to NEAR LILAC; NEAR is shorter than FIND in morse.

The "tuning fork" used in the SFX puzzle.

The SFX puzzle itself has also been in my head for several years; now felt like a good time for it, though I think maybe I should’ve included other similar puzzles. The shape is a FEZ reference because it’s the first geometry I placed then I never felt the need to change it.

There’s a post joking about puzzle-game conlangs being just encrypted english. The blue text came from reading this and imagining such a “conlang” turning out to be simple obfuscation, like bad handwriting. This idea had stuck in my head for some time before starting work on the level.

A room showcasing the "blue text"

Originally, the SFX puzzle gave the hint about the blue text; and the blue text led to the hidden signs. This got flipped after some playtesters figured out the blue text immediately, and the blue text was made more clear (though it probably could still have used a more distinct single hint)

In retrospect it probably would’ve been a good idea to have helpful hints for the other path if the player got too far down a single one only. A lot of people do end up stumbling on hidden signs by chance and I think a lot of that is from lack of guidance.

I really wanted players to have multiple “routes” through the puzzle flowchart, so if they’re stuck on one puzzle they can still make progress elsewhere. I did include several gates to make sure they never fell too far behind either path, though.

I gave myself a certain deadline to get all the puzzles implemented, and stuff like the "paintings clue" didn’t make the cut. The colors in the picture are to help me track my progress implementing each puzzle. It stopped getting updated after a while though.

a lot of notes-to-self and signboards highlighted in colored rectangles

I use this one diagram program all the time and I used it for this map to brainstorm what sort of puzzles would fit the map, and what order they’d go in. I don’t have that anymore but I did copy it into lonn. A lot has been moved around or scrapped since then, though!

a simple wooden well in the ground. There's significant negative space on the left side of the screenshot showing off another exit.

The exception is the room left of the well; it’s meant to feel like a secret, but the room geometry tries to push your eye towards it. It’s a clue that there’s more to find.

Eventually I settled on more-hidden secret rooms, with a map in the well to show their locations; this worked perfectly.

an average room in the level. There are many "breaks" around the outsides of the room that are all blocked by spikes.

The reason the level’s geometry is so “broken” around the edges of rooms is to make the 4 main hidden rooms blend in more with the rest of the level. Those went back and forth from more- to less- hidden as I wanted players to find them during precisely their 2nd run through the level.

From this idea the concept of using morse (and even the “rotated” morse) sprang forwards pretty quickly. In addition, wondering what sort of information a sign saying “try again” would convey led naturally to the restart code, the key-smuggling puzzle, and even the final puzzle of the map.

the player in a dark room, with a bunch of strange text and a sign labelled TRY AGAIN. The end of the level is locked behind a door with no clear way to open.

I like having a “pitch” to myself for my levels (say, a map of just the 2b heart room). For this, the whole level came from the concept of beating a map, entering the heart room, and being told to TRY AGAIN and seeing a bunch of cryptic symbols; replaying the map you’d find stuff you’d missed before