Celeste is a critically acclaimed indie platformer from 2018. It tells the story of a young woman by the name of Madeline who decides to climb Mount Celeste (a real mountain in British Columbia) as a sort of Spirit Quest. She struggles from depression and anxiety, and reckons with these parts of herself during her climb as they are brought to life in the form of a ghostly apparation colloquially known as Badeline. She is Madeline but purple. Only by accepting Badeline and working with her darker side is she able to ultimately ascend the mountain in a climactic final chapter. It's a beautiful story that is beautifully told by the game's writing, visuals, and gameplay, all working in harmony. It just so happens that the game also has the best platforming mechanics of any game I've ever played.

When a video game gives you enough nuanced control over the player character, playing the game can become like playing an instrument. You can train for years and years and still never truly master an instrument. When you play for long enough, you can actually be creative with the sounds you make. You can make music, develop your own style, improvise, and sight-read. With mechanics that are deep enough, these same phenomena can emerge. Games like Rocket League, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Ultrakill, and Celeste give you such deep, limitless control over your character that you can become arbitrarily skilled at the game's mechanics. As a result, each has developed a strong community around pushing the game to its limits. In the case of Celeste, this manifests in both the speedrunning community and modding community.

Celeste's cascading depth of movement is one of the main reasons I originally got into the mods, but the reason many folks stay, including myself, is the wonderful medium of map-making. Map, here, essentially refers to a custom level that uses the game's mechanics as a base, but offers new platforming challenges, new environments, new stories, and sometimes even new mechanics. As such, it shares a lot of skills and challenges with video game development, focusing more on the level design aspects (typically). I started making maps in around 2021, and have published four maps so far. Quality over quantity, let's say. I think in this part of my website, I'm gonna have a page for each mod or something. We'll see.