How Celeste Was Made and Inspired by Real-Life Rock Climbing

The development story of Celeste is very much intertwined with one of the developer’s own personal experiences with anxiety and depression but before that, it started out as a fun little project between two friends. In August 2015, game developers Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry decided to do a game jam project where they had to develop a game in four days. “Maddy and I wanted to create a short game in PICO-8 over a weekend. We wanted our concept to be fairly minimalist (partially due to the time constraints we set on ourselves and the limitations of the tool) but that also had a lot of depth in mechanics. The idea of a character struggling to climb a mountain felt like it fit really well with this.”

Maddy took care of the audio and game design, while Noel was responsible for the art and coding the game. Since it was developed for the PICO-8 fantasy console, the two friends immediately made it available for anyone on the internet to try out and play it. They later renamed the PICO-8 game to Celeste Classic.

While it was positively received, especially among speedrunners, Celeste Classic lacked much of the story and atmosphere of the fully realized version that would be released three years later. This was mostly because of the limitations of the PICO-8 console, which is why the two developers had to limit Celeste Classic to 16 colors and 30 levels. Furthermore, Maddy and Noel just wanted to make a fun and hard platformer about climbing a mountain, nothing more. However, in January 2016, they decided to expand the PICO-8 game, because the developers had grown fond of the protagonist and they saw the potential of the general idea.

Their goal was to still keep the project relatively small and finish it in about two to three months. Maddy took on the role of director, designer, writer and gameplay coder and Noel was once again responsible for most of the coding. The moment both friends started brainstorming on how to expand Celeste Classic, the ideas came flowing in. After a couple of months of development, they felt it was time to ask some colleagues for help to give the game the production quality it deserves. 

Artists Amora Bettany and Pedro Medeiros, who both had worked with Maddy and Noel before, were brought on board to provide the artwork. Maddy had worked with them on Towerfall and Noel had a project of his own called Skytorn which Amora and Pedro were producing the art for. Unfortunately, Skytorn was eventually cancelled.

Around the same time, the developers reached out to Lena Raine since they really liked her work on SoundCloud. Shortly after, she joined the team and started composing the soundtrack for Celeste. With the addition of these three talented artists, the game was making good progress. However, the team wasn’t yet complete, since they still needed someone to help with the sound design. Luckily, Power Up Audio, the studio of sound engineers that also worked on Towerfall and Skytorn, agreed to team up once again for Celeste. Power Up Audio used FMOD Studio to create and manage all the sound effects in the game.

Aseprite was used to create all the pixelart and in-game animations and all the hi-res and concept art was made with Clip Studio Paint, previously better known as Manga Studio. The 3D model of the mountain on the map select screen was made by Gabby DaRienzo and she used Blender to produce the 3D graphics. The lighting used in that 3D model was done by Sven Bergström. 

All the game’s code was done in C# and the studio used the Microsoft XNA framework to develop Celeste. A custom level editor called Ogmo Editor was created to produce all the levels and was made publicly available for any developer to download and use. When the individual levels were finished they were stitched together with a custom map designer tool.

The base game of Celeste consists of eight chapters and Maddy and Noel describe the first chapter as the more expanded game of the PICO-8 version that they wanted to develop in a couple of months and release. Once they were deep into development though, they felt there was a lot more they could do with the world and characters so the decision was made to go all out and turn Celeste into something bigger. 

One of the studio’s main goals was to make sure that when someone starts playing Celeste, it’s immediately fun. It took a lot of iteration to get to that point and playtesting was a crucial part of that process. Maddy and Noel, being roommates throughout Celete’s entire development, would invite friends over and watch them play for hours at a time. Whenever one of their friends would point something out that didn’t feel as good, the developers would make changes on the spot to get immediate feedback, until their friends were flowing as best as they could. 

Noel mentioned that the good thing about developing a platformer is that you can quickly hand a build to someone and ask them how it feels to play, since you only need a few levels to get a sense of the way the game feels and flows. For him and Maddy it was important to visually see how people reacted to the game during playtests and see how they were emotionally handling it. Lastly, Noel said that they focused on making the game tough but fair. “We also had a general philosophy that, though we want the game to feel hard, we always want it to feel fair. The game works in the player’s favor, wherever possible, and when it felt like a level or mechanic was hard in the ‘wrong’ way, it was cut or modified.”

Maddy describes Celeste as a fractal story, a story made up of smaller stories. At the game level, Celeste is about a girl who’s running away from her personal problems and decides to climb a mountain, which forces Madeline to confront those problems. Like most platformers, Celeste is split up into areas and each area is a smaller story within the main story, that has its own arc and pacing. The team wanted each area to feel distinct and unique, with their own aesthetic and mechanical themes. Maddy also said that the areas are a lot like Metroid maps in that all the rooms are connected and seamless. There are branching paths and even secret branching paths. 

Every area is then further divided into levels and the director describes each level as a really small quick story. Visualizing each level this way helped the team to anchor all their design decisions. In practice, they were constantly zooming in and out of these three perspectives to re-evaluate their work. When players think back to a certain level, the developers want them to remember a story, rather than an annoying jump at the start of the level. The team was always looking for ways to offload their narrative onto their level design in the hopes that the experience of the player matches the emotional experience of the protagonist.

Just like the PICO-8 version, Celeste at its core is about climbing a mountain so it’s no surprise that the moment to moment gameplay is influenced by real life rock climbing. “One dimension of rock climbing that I love is the idea of multiple approaches. Because rock climbing uses your body and everyone’s body is different, routes in rock climbing are usually designed loosely enough that they can be solved in a lot of different ways.”

The three main moves, jumping, dashing and climbing all give the player vertical progress, but they use different resources and have different nuances and trade-offs. Therefore, the player is able to approach the platforming in different ways. At the start of development Maddy didn’t realize yet the importance of multiple approaches so the developer would design levels with a specific solution in mind. However, playtesters would always try to do something different to complete the level. This caused Maddy to rethink the level design and figure out all the ways people would try to complete levels so that they could enable them as well as possible for players.

This wasn’t an easy task since the developers had a difficult time finding a balance between offering multiple solutions to every level without making the game too easy. It goes without saying that every level went through multiple iterations, but Maddy underlines that the story of the level was never adjusted. If the story wasn’t working, they would either scrap the entire level or turn the story into something completely else.

Although there’s always an intended story and pathway for each level, that’s approachable in multiple ways, Maddy revealed that it is possible to skip the intended route and beat the levels in a much faster but much more difficult way. The director said that this was completely intentional and the team sees it as a second story to the levels that’s intended for speedrunners that have a much better understanding of the game after multiple playthroughs.

“As far as multiple approaches in rock climbing goes, this is like when you go to the rock gym and there’s that one person that’s super ripped and doing all the routes with just their arms. If someone wants to put the effort to get that good at our game, we want to reward them for it.” They did make sure that the much faster way was never mistaken for the intended path, since this would otherwise frustrate newcomers to the game.

One of the biggest struggles during development was making sure that the levels and areas matched up. Maddy described it as a slow and painstakingly job, since they never got anything right on the first try so the levels and areas had to be adapted over and over again. This also meant that a lot of work had to be discarded, because a lot of the levels that Maddy would sketch out, wouldn’t fit the mood of the area. On top of that, the team had lots of inspiration for harder levels with fun mechanical ideas, but they didn’t fit into the main story. That’s why a hard mode was added to the game, where the team was able to fully explore the design space without having to worry about the story. The team has said that games like Super Mario Bros. 3, Donkey Kong Country 2, Metroid, Kero Blaster, and many others were a huge inspiration for the gameplay and level design.

The studio didn’t want to develop Celeste with a “no player gets left behind” mentality, since it’s supposed to be a difficult challenge for both the player and the protagonist but Maddy did take extra care that the first area was as accessible as possible for anyone that played it. When the team was already late in development, they decided to further accommodate less skillful players by adding an assist mode. This happened after a big internal discussion and they agreed that they wanted as many players as possible to be able to enjoy the story without the difficulty potentially holding them back. The assist mode provides many different options to tweak the difficulty level and this was done to not be condescending to players that prefer an easier experience.

Maddy confirmed that the game takes place near Vancouver, where the developer lives, although the mountain is completely fictional. However, the title Celeste is inspired by a real mountain called Celeste Mountain and the team discovered this fact when they were googling cool names for mountains when they were working on Celeste Classic. To honor Celeste’s humble beginnings, the team ported the original PICO-8 game into the 2D platformer as an easter egg.

While the gameplay is inspired by rock climbing, the story of Celeste is very much a reflection of Maddy’s personal experience with anxiety and depression. “I overwork myself when I’m anxious. Our work is a great creative outlet, but it stops being cathartic and starts being avoidant when I push myself to those extremes. It took me a while to realize that crunch can be a form of self-harm.” Maddy further described the experience as painful, yet the developer wanted to explore these feelings of anxiety in Celeste. Although Maddy’s mental illness informed the story, the director also said that Steven Universe was a big inspiration and that the show actually taught Maddy how to write a better story.

When Maddy decided they wanted to implement their personal experience with mental illness in Celeste, the story finally started falling into place. According to Noel, this happened around the time they were working on chapter 3 and they actually went back and redid some of the dialogue in previous chapters to fit Maddy’s new vision for the story. This change also impacted one of the game mechanics that the team was experimenting with. Originally, the dark side of Madeline was more of a gameplay mechanic, but with the new story in place, it made much more sense to turn her into her own proper character. This darker side of the protagonist, also dubbed Badelaine by the fanbase, became the physical manifestation that represents Madeline’s own feelings of depression. 

Throughout Celeste’s development, Maddy realized it was ok to feel the way they were feeling and that failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This frame of mind made its way into Celeste by reminding the player from time to time that it’s alright to fail. “If you’re making a game about anxiety and depression, it felt like to us that we needed to show the same kindness to the player that we want to show ourselves.”

Maddy and the team did make it clear that they didn’t set out to make a game to help combat depression, but rather to tell a story born from personal experiences. “Our top priorities were to tell a story that meant something to us and explore these topics from an individual perspective, to draw players into this world with these characters we grew to love. Our intention going in wasn’t to represent mental illness in general, or to make a ‘how to deal with depression’ guide, and we didn’t think to consult professionals on the topic.”

Although the studio didn’t consult with any experts, they made sure not to minimize the very serious issues mental illness can cause. “It was a very iterative process, and all the dialog in the game went through multiple rounds of rewrites as our understanding evolved. Mr. Oshiro’s scenes in the hotel, in particular, changed quite a bit as we discovered his place in the story. Making sure we didn’t trivialize the problems our characters were grappling with, was a big concern for us.”

As mentioned before, the narrative fell in place when Maddy knew they wanted to tell a story about anxiety and depression, but for a long time the developer didn’t know how to end the story. “I didn’t know how it would end because I was still dealing with this stuff while we were making it. One of the things I realized while we were working on it is that I want to fix my work-life balance. It was kinda tough realizing that and then being like ‘Welp, have to finish this game now!’”

Fortunately, throughout Celeste’s development, Maddy started to come to terms with their depression and gained a better understanding of it. This helped the director fill in the details of the way Madeline deals with her own depression in the game. Without spoiling too much of the story, the studio wanted to communicate that there’s no simple solution for what Madeline goes through in the game and that the conflict within her isn’t magically solved when the credits start rolling.

The game was first publicly announced in July 2016 and the team even streamed some of Celeste’s development on Twitch to give people a first look at their new project. A few months later, in September 2016, the platformer was first publicly playable at PAX West at the Indie Megabooth. Back then, the developers were planning on releasing Celeste in 2017 and were even hoping to release Celeste during the launch window of the Nintendo Switch. 

Unfortunately, the studio had to delay the release to January 2018 so that they could realize the full vision they had for Celeste. “We tried very hard to get Celeste ready in time to be a Nintendo Switch “launch window” title. Our first self-imposed deadline for Celeste was April 2017, and looking back now that seems laughably optimistic; but game development has a reputation of being notoriously hard to schedule for good reason. I can’t speak for everyone, but for us, game development is largely a process of discovery. Back at the start of 2017, we thought Celeste would span around 200–300 levels stitched together by a minimalistic narrative. Today we have over 500 levels and it looks like we’ll crest 600 pretty soon. Celeste’s narrative has grown to an essential feature of the experience, and maybe the aspect of the game I’m most personally proud of because we pushed ourselves so hard on it. It deserves room to breathe and become everything it can be and fortunately we can afford to give it that space. We need to know that we took it as far as we could.”

Celeste was officially released on January 25th, 2018 on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows, Linux and macOS. The game was universally praised by critics, complementing pretty much every aspect of the indie platformer and it received multiple perfect scores as a result. When players got their hands on it, many of them felt a personal connection to the story and its characters. In some cases, it even helped them with their own personal struggles. The composer, Lena Raine, shared something that a fan had said to her. “One of them mentioned that they are suicidal, but chose to live as a result of the encouragement given by the game. I legitimately don’t think I’ve ever felt as much validation that what I’m doing with my life can help people.”

Besides the story and gameplay, the soundtrack was also highly praised around the world and was officially released by record label Materia Collective. Additionally, an official piano sheet music book and piano album was later released on January 25th, 2019. Lena was given free reign over the soundtrack and suffice to say, the studio was thrilled with what she came up with and further said that her strong vision really clicked with the story. In many cases, the soundtrack also informed the direction of the level design and the art.

When the time came for award season in 2018, Celeste, despite being an indie game, certainly wasn’t left behind and was nominated for dozens of awards, even as game of the year. It went on to win a bunch of those awards and the team was completely overwhelmed and honored by all the attention the game had received throughout the year. I’m at a loss for things to say… all year about the reception. There is one thing I want to say though. If Celeste has helped you come to terms with mental illness, I just want to say that you deserve credit for that. That change came from inside of you and you’re capable of a lot more. Thank you.

The game’s critical success also translated into financial success, selling over 500,000 copies by the end of 2018.

On January 1st, 2019, the game received a limited collector’s edition and later in September, Celeste received a substantial free update that added a new chapter titled Farewell, which added a hundred new levels as well as 40 minutes of new music. Around the same time, the developers made the decision to form a brand new studio. “I’m retiring Matt Makes Games Inc., for the most part. MMG will still be listed as the publisher or developer for TowerFall and Celeste, depending on the platform, but all our future work will come from EXOK. I started Matt Makes Games when I was working solo in my parents’ basement, and I never thought I’d be working with such an amazing team on games of this scale.” By September, Celeste had sold almost an additional 500,000 copies, putting the studio in a more comfortable position for its next project. 

“I don’t have an exact up-to-date number, but I know we’re coming up on a million copies soon which is unbelievable to us. It’s really given us space to create on our own terms for the near future. It’s crazy that we don’t have to charge money for Chapter 9, for example; and it’s amazing that we have the time and resources to form our new studio and get everyone working together in one office. That’ll make our next project go a lot smoother.”

That next project that Maddy referenced is yet to be revealed, but we know for certain it won’t be a sequel to Celeste. While this may be a disappointment to some, the studio is excited for the future and determined to make more memorable gaming experiences. “We really don’t want to make a sequel to Celeste. Maybe in the future we’ll change our minds, but right now we don’t know how we’d do a sequel justice. And besides, we’re way more interested in making something new for our next full release.”