Hello fellow strawberry lovers,

Today marks the day that the bee-sides Celeste 64 mod is officially one year old and I like to reflect on some stats and some general thoughts of what went well and what ended up not so great.

The Statistics

As I'm writing this I have 356 downloads on itch and 93 downloads on gamebanana. It excites me that more than 400 people tried my mod. And I like to thank everyone who gave it a try and especially the people who streamed it! Did I expect more downloads? Absolutely. Was that that a reasonable expectation? I'll talk about that later.

What went well

I think delivering creating the mod within 7 days was a great success. Finding people who wanted to collaborate within that timeframe and actually have some results from it was one of the most fun parts of the project. My secondary goal of being the first releasing a serious Celeste level mod also sort of succeeded. There are where some kaizo/brutally difficult remixes of the normal levels already and in a way my mod is a remix too, but I think our team went through the extra effort to make some original content too.

After these 7 days I had a holiday break abroad and it was great fun to see the first streamers pick up my mod after I was done snowboarding during daytime. This sparked the idea of making a trailer when I was home and also some minor tweaks to the levels, which I was originally against. My original idea was to keep the levels as is, but seeing some extreme frustration I decided it would be for the better to do some minor updates.

After the holiday break I went on a marketing spree with my newly made trailer (which I still enjoy watching a lot). I felt I was pushing it so hard it might annoy people. However if I didn't share it how do people know of the existence of the mod?

I have to give a big thanks to Fuji mod loader for featuring my mod. This helped my visibility immensely.

Also a huge win was the speedrun of my mod by KingjO444. Huge thanks for running my map even multiple times! Go watch the current world record video.

What didn't go great

So first of all, my expectations where that Celeste 64 itself would blow up. I expected the popularity of the original game would automatically transfer to the 64 version, especially since its free. I also expected that people automatically would want more out of it because of it being a short experience. However; while I can't look into the stats of the original Celeste 64 game; I think it didn't make a big splash. And also people seemed to have their fill after beating it.

I feel the visibility of the mod and mods in general was and is lacking. It's a pity because it's very easy to mod this game and it's nicely integrated into the game structure itself. I think because there's no other Celeste 64 map mods it also hurts my downloads, because I think it could popularize both the main game and the mods.

Now this is stuff I don't have in my own hands. However what I did have in my own hands; the difficulty of my mod; went a bit overboard too. I initially went in making the mod as an extension of the difficulty of the original game, so you would have a good time if you managed to beat the original.

However due to time crunch I made a few cassette levels way too difficult. I didn't even properly test these myself, only segmented. I added checkpoints in the cassette levels, see if I could beat those segments and removed the checkpoints and calling it a day. And because of this I totally missed the point of Celeste. Streamer CnEY probably articulated this critique maybe the best, the levels are overly long, inconsistent and just frustrating, where the original Celeste had short segments of consistent difficulty. I tried to mitigate that by making the most frustrating levels a bit easier, but it didn't change that the levels where just too long. This would've been fixed by just leaving the checkpoints in the levels as they where when I tested them. But checkpoints within cassettes wasn't part of the original game so that felt wrong.

So what I instead had to do was breaking the cassette levels apart in multiple shorter challenges. This would've made a higher total berries count too, which is now the awkward number 22.

Lastly I would've like to have tested the routing for a zero death route. I don't know if it's possible now with some awkward berry placement in the overworld map. Also of all the streams I didn't see any streamer routing the map in the intended way, which I don't mind but feels like it's a flaw in my design. Maybe some better sign posting would've helped (yellow paint maybe 😉?).

Conclusion

I should've playtested the level mod more, but all in all I'm happy I delivered this mod (with help of friends) within the 7 days. It would've been better in the end to create the mod within 7 days, let playtesters play it for another 7 days, polish it up for maybe another day or two and then officially release it. I would've been well on time to be the first serious level pack, but I wouldn't have known! It would've ended up being a better product though, but fortunately it's still enjoyable as is for many people. And I still remember the creation of this mod fondly, which might not have happened if I added 2 weeks of crunch to the creation process.

What's next for me? I'm looking into modding other games too, but the biggest possibility is that I fall back to modding for Quake. Although making a track for Parking Garage Rally Circuit looks fun too!