itch.io

Amazing, as someone who grew up with the Sega Master System and is now aware of the similarities with the MSX, this feels super authentic in every way, including that unforgiving difficulty!

How did you manage all this unique art? I attempted a "larger scaled" game like this with my Alex Kidd Pico 8 de-make, and even trying to come up with a level storage format that re-used level sequences to "compress" the level, I still hit every graphical, code, storage and even sound limit there is to hit (I had to reduce the music to use arpeggio chords to save "tracks" for other songs and sounds).  Just looking at the gifs and screenshots on your page here, I really wonder what techniques you used...

Actually I did - when I made the post above, i was trying to remember why I hadn't done it and now I know - I remember jumping around and pressing all buttons, pulling triggers, in frustration - the only clear moves are jump, wall jump (which I thought was a double jump initially) and dash.

The issue is I didn't know you could "climb".  Notice I worked it out right after the previous poster told me I could climb.  You have little chance to find out you can climb by accident - because it only works when you happen to be in contact with the wall, which only lasts for a second, and even then, you have to be holding the trigger for it to happen, pressing everything experimentally won't work.  So it requires foreknowledge.

After reading comments, I'm guessing most people here are Celeste fans.  The only version I've played is the Pico8 one, the original. I guarantee you, if you test this game on non-Celeste fans, the majority of people will get stuck on the same point.   I've had gamers get stuck on my games for far less egregious reasons than this during my testing sessions.

Last time I played Celeste was on Pico 8, the original.

You're welcome, I love the retro style, the transitions, the artwork in general... have you used Rewired for your input? Apparently it makes remapping easier. (It's a Unity plugin, I assume the game is made in Unity?)

Thank you, yes. The game could do with a prompt or even just a controls listing on the main store page description.

Continue works :) 

Actually the problem with "New game" is the popup after - "No" or "Yes" both don't do anything.

Also this is one of my personal gripes with modern retro games, curious to hear your thoughts - I notice your main character has 8 way directional movement, and yet the d-pad does nothing, you can only control them with the thumbstick. Do you plan on supporting the d-pad?

Dev team, for your own sake, do even the tiniest thing about this progression blocker, even a controls listing on the Itch page. Now that I've just got past that jump i can see this is a beautifully constructed, probably well designed, Nintendo 64 style game, but I've spent all my patience on that first pillar and really need to get back to work. I might've completed a level or something otherwise.

Thanks for the additional tip.  It's probably a great game but I reckon 90% of the people who try this will stop dead where I did and you won't even see them take the time to post here like I did.

I was legit resigned to figuring the game was still WIP and figured I'd come back later when they fixed it. I couldn't progress.

It's the trigger. Do you know I tried all 4 face buttons, found they were doubled up (2 jumps, 2 dashes) and without a spare thought, I intuitively took from that there are no more controls (otherwise why would they double up instead of adding more actions to those buttons?)  And I definitely wouldn't have thought to pull triggers in a retro game.

Dev team; if you had no time for a tutorial or prompt in a week, I get it - but not even a control description on the Itch page like every other mini game on Itch?

Where is the moving platform in this screenshot? The things I have circled are just aesthetic element  that you clip through if you jump at them.  The platform on the far right has the car and nowhere to progress.
if there really is supposed to be a moving platform somewhere, then I say this is a bug and the platform hasn't shown up. I have looked all around that pillar and spent too long jumping to my death.

I didn't see any moving platform. The game starts with a vertical pillar that you can't ascend because the dash only moves horizontally, and I spun the camera all around, all I found was a platform behind me with a car on it. I was able to jump onto that no problem, but there's no where to go from there.

There is a sign at the base of the pillar that simply has an arrow pointing up. The goal is clear - ascend the pillar, using your movement mechanics I assume.

When you write code for those old consoles, you have to build an entire engine from scratch using nothing but the SDK for the console, it's usually only worth the investment if you are planning on building a company around that and releasing several games.  Celeste, like most indie games, is built using an existing game engine.

I can't get over the first jump either, been trying for over 10 minutes on this one jump. Sorry guys. I know it's made in a week but not having SOME direction for this impossible jump is cutting the corners a bit too much.  I've tried every combination of double jump and dash that I can see - the best I can get is she's blue and she's above the ledge but heading away from it so she can't land on it.

I even glitched through the wall to my death in my attempts.

As far as I can tell, you can jump, wall jump, and dash in any direction horizontally only.  If there's a way to dash upwards to make it up the ledge, I cannot for the life of me, work this out.

I can't get over the first jump either, been trying for 10 minutes. Sorry guys. I know it's made in a week but not having some direction for this impossible jump is cutting the corners a bit too much.  I've tried every combination of double jump and dash that I can see - the best I can get is she's blue and she's above the ledge but heading away from it so she can't land on it.

I even glitched through the wall to my death in my attempts.

According to the other reply, if 2nd thumbstick is required to move the camera 90 degrees to perform the jump, why doesn't the camera start out that way? Not that it helped, so not sure if that's the answer either.

Couldn't get past the menu - buttons seem to do the wrong thing and I couldn't "New game" and ended up choosing "Continue" just to get somewhere, and the screen turned into a mess of polygons and locked up.

Coincidentally, someone this week posted a fix for exactly that problem on the HopSquash Steam forums!

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1012450/discussions/0/3182362958577461213/

I love the vibe, it's so cute.

Yes that's the best process - finish current projects and take out some extra time to look into how other engines work. I think it's exciting actually. Defold looks really good for super efficient 2D pixel art games. Cocos looks good for low spec 3D like for VR and mobile.  And of course you have Unreal for high end 3D.

Ah I didn't know about this.  For 16:10 it should have black bars on the top and bottom, not zoom in and crop the edges. I'll see what I can do when work clears up, but I will add this to the list.

That first one is very similar in theme to what I need for my next game :)

Actually I think this has to do with the Godot engine not handling that thing where you can set the desktop font scaling to be larger to help with reading or compensate for the fonts being tiny on 4k displays.    Do you have this setting?

Also what operating system are you using?

Happy to help, can you send a photo of this? I believe you can paste it right here in the comments.   Be sure to include the entire monitor in the view so I can see what kind of TV/monitor you have and what's going on.

Loving this so far. But for a "cozy" adventure game, something pretty horrific happens in the first 5 minutes! Come on! I was expecting something more like Kyrandia, Hand of Fate :)

No pictures?

This is really cool, I actually had no idea they continued the vector stuff for that long, and adopted pattern fills... I see they have a YouTube playlist of a tonne of those, thanks :)

Oh for real? Wow, I just thought it was the first ones that used vectors, with the flat colours.  Where did you find that out? I saw a Sierra documentary, they went into detail on how they built the first games.

Oh yes I read about the original Kings Quest games, they did store the art as vectors, because they had to, it was the only way to fit it in RAM on the Apple computer.  But Monkey Island etc. the ones your game looks like, they stored them as proper bitmaps.

Yes I completely skipped over mentioning the music :)  Just plain note data...

Unity adds a lot of overhead. Looking at the graphics, this game probably would've come out to a handful of disks at the most, if it was actually made in the 90's.  They would've used C, wrote their own engine specifically for the target platform, and the graphics would've been stored as paletted indexed formats instead of RGB (so, for a 16 colour game, 1/2 a byte per pixel, instead of 3 bytes per pixel).

I say a handful of disks, because games like Monkey Island came on a couple of disks, but this game has much larger sprites than those games did on average!

This is so dark and enchanting, I love it.

Look it's one thing to not understand the technical achievement this is, but to arrogantly call it "lame"... I can safely assume you have not achieved anything remotely as impressive in your life.

I don't think pixel art is dependant on any particular operating system.

That's a win in my opinion :)

Loving the variety of assets coming out :)

Nice, it's a bit dark and moody but still colourful enough to be a happy platformer. Bright but enchanting.

I loved this, I got to the end, that was awesome :) Regarding LCD game authenticity, I appreciate breaking the limit of having fixed areas for each images, that was always super akward and limiting about those games, but why does it have pixels?? :) LCD games didn't need to use pixels, they were made of smooth round shapes.

I love how much content you're producing, and I was thinking about how at times I really wanted one of your level themes, but it wasn't the right vibe for what I needed, so I thought of something (that you may already be doing?) you could combine different terms together to keep generating new kinds of backgrounds, so "theme" and "atmosphere" for example. Theme is forest, snow, lava, countryside etc. and atmosphere is sunny/happy, gloomy, creepy, haunting, whimsical, etc. and then you can go through the combinations, eg. happy forest, haunting forest, etc. and someone is sure to find something they like!

I love this, as soon as I saw the thumbnail I knew exactly what you were going for ;)

I have purchased this, your artwork is lovely and the cost is really low, thank you. But I can't really call this pixel art - it's full sized artwork that has been scaled down, and so looks very dark and blurry as a result.  It needs to be cleaned up or drawn at the final scale from the beginning.

You're a very good artist, your full sized portraits and your background artwork has come out really well. But small detailed characters like this need to be done in pixel art style properly to look clear.