We’re back! This week’s Indie Game Spotlight is a real beauty. Celeste (@celestegame ) is a narrative-driven game that focuses on the story of Madeline. The goal? Help her survive her inner demons on a journey to the top of Celeste Mountain.
It’s a real treat of a gaming experience, which is why we were so excited to interview co-creator and programmer Noel Berry about this award-winning game.
The one year anniversary of Celeste is coming up soon. How does it feel?
It’s been a pretty wild year. The support and reactions we’ve received from everyone has been overwhelming.
I personally hadn’t released a commercial game like this before and was under the assumption that when you finished a game it was “done” and you’d move onto new things, but there’s a surprising amount of post-launch work. At this point though we’re all excited to dive into the next project and hopefully make something cool :D
What influenced the story behind Celeste?
A lot of the story was influenced from personal experiences. When we first started Celeste it didn’t have much of a story—we knew it was about a young woman struggling to climb a mountain, and that the player’s experience of playing through the game would kind of mimic her own challenging adventure, but that was it. As the game grew, Matt [Thorson] (our Director) began writing dialog to work in some of the gameplay mechanics. This grew very organically until it was obvious that the story was going to play a really significant role, and a lot of the earlier chapters were iterated on to make it all flow.
Making video games can be extremely tiring, how do you keep yourself from burning out?
Yeah, this is tricky—it can be easy to get invested in a project and start spending all your waking hours working on it, especially when you work for yourself. We generally just tried our best to watch out for each other and make sure we all took breaks. Taking time off is important not only for yourself but it can help give perspective and ideas on something you might be hung up on. We also really feel that crunching decreases the quality of the work you’re doing and tried our best to avoid it—though we definitely went too hard for the last month of the project.
Are there any interesting stories to how you created a certain character?
The “Part of You” introduced in Chapter 2 started off as a gameplay mechanic—a ghostly figure chasing you through a strange tower, but as Matt worked on the story she grew organically into one of the most important aspects of the game and really ended up driving the entire story.
What’s the significance behind strawberries?
When Matt and I first made the original Celeste over the course of four days, it was created in a “Fantasy Console” called PICO-8 which had a very limited choice of 16 colors and small screen size. We wanted a collectible that felt kind of like old arcade games, and strawberries fit the palette and size the best. We thought having them give you points that were meaningless would be funny.
What genre of game would you like to make next?
We feel very comfortable in the 2D platforming space, but that might also be a good reason to try something totally different. I’ve always felt something inspired by Animal Crossing would be really interesting to play around with, but that’s pretty outside our usual wheelhouse. Who knows!
Ready to dive into Celeste? Make sure to give their Tumblr a follow! Celeste is available on Nintendo Switch, PS4, XBox One, and Steam and Itch.io for Win/Mac/Linux! Phew.
