Celeste

Hard platforming makes the player live Madeline's stubborn persistence. Madeline stubbornly climbs a mountain, so the player must stubbornly persist through hard platforming, matching gameplay difficulty to the story.

Mark Brown: "if you want to tell a story about suffering and failure, then the gameplay should reflect that."

Explain intent and audience before the player turns it on. Celeste says its difficulty is essential, recommends a first playthrough without assists, and says the mode is for players who find the game inaccessible, such as new players, players with disabilities or those who want the story.

Framing lets the game offer opt-outs without spoiling the intended experience; most players never turn it on, and Mark Brown says it might as well not exist for him.

Coyote time and jump buffering keep near-misses from feeling unfair. Madeline can jump a few frames after leaving a ledge, and a jump pressed just before landing is remembered and executed on touchdown.

Noel Berry says a swallowed press feels like the game missed your input: "you want to feel like you're in control of your character." Mark Brown later copied both features from Celeste's movement into his own Mind Over Magnet controller.

Explain intent and audience before the player turns it on. Celeste says its difficulty is essential, recommends a first playthrough without assists, and says the mode is for players who find the game inaccessible, such as new players, players with disabilities or those who want the story.

Framing lets the game offer opt-outs without spoiling the intended experience; most players never turn it on, and Mark Brown says it might as well not exist for him.

Explain intent and audience before the player turns it on. Celeste says its difficulty is essential, recommends a first playthrough without assists, and says the mode is for players who find the game inaccessible, such as new players, players with disabilities or those who want the story.

Framing lets the game offer opt-outs without spoiling the intended experience; most players never turn it on, and Mark Brown says it might as well not exist for him.

Heat Signature labels optional permadeath and asks players to keep it. Tom Francis added optional permadeath in the first major update, with a label saying turning it off leads to less interesting stories and less variety.

He changed his question from whether the game is better without it to how to help players who hate it.

Short, subtle effects confirm every input without heavy juice. Jumps squash and stretch Madeline, landings kick up dust and rumble the controller, and each dash gets a four-frame pause, a tiny screen shake, shadow trails and a white contrail.

The camera wobbles in the same direction as the dash to sell its speed and power. The effects are deliberately short, not a Vlambeer-style juice fest.

Coyote time and jump buffering keep near-misses from feeling unfair. Madeline can jump a few frames after leaving a ledge, and a jump pressed just before landing is remembered and executed on touchdown.

Noel Berry says a swallowed press feels like the game missed your input: "you want to feel like you're in control of your character." Mark Brown later copied both features from Celeste's movement into his own Mind Over Magnet controller.

The climb's shape mirrors the story's emotional arc. The ascent rises steadily with small setbacks, then the chapter Reflections sends Madeline plummeting to the base, so the story's lowest point is also the lowest place.

Show hidden ability states visibly, like Madeline's hair colour. Madeline's hair turns blue when her dash is available, so players always know whether they can dash.

Shovel Knight's King Knight lacks such a cue: his spin states with and without bash access share the same animation.

Madeline starts and stops in a few frames, so she obeys instantly. Madeline reaches full speed in about six frames and stops in three, about four times faster than Super Meat Boy to accelerate and nine times faster than Mario in New Super Mario Bros U to stop. Top speed is modest and there is no run button.

The curves are just long enough to feel human and to prevent huge standing jumps, so you rarely slip off a platform edge. The goal was control, not speed: "fast enough to feel fluid, but slow enough that you feel in total control."

A short jump with real hang time feels bouncy, not floaty. Madeline jumps about three times her own height, one of the shortest jumps around, rising and falling fast but with enough hang time to line up a landing.

Mario jumps about four body heights and Super Meat Boy about six, while Yarny in Unravel barely hangs and feels leaden. Jump feel is set by height relative to body size plus the climb, hang and fall of the curve.

Heavy air friction and a static camera make landings precise. Madeline turns with no skidding, and releasing the stick mid-air drops her almost straight down. The zoomed-out static camera often frames the whole room, so she is the only thing moving.

The cost of the wide framing was less detail in characters and environments, which the team judged worth it.

Three moves with different feels turn rooms into movement puzzles. The climb is sticky, stamina-limited and precise; the dash is the chaotic option, usable once in the air until Madeline touches ground or a crystal. Rooms are solved by choosing which move to use where, often with more than one answer.

Stamina is hidden and starts at 110 points, draining at different rates when holding, climbing or climb jumping. The dash locks direction at max speed for only the first 0.15 seconds, then hands control back so you can cancel momentum before hitting spikes, more expressive than the static dash in the PICO-8 precursor.

Show hidden ability states visibly, like Madeline's hair colour. Madeline's hair turns blue when her dash is available, so players always know whether they can dash.

Shovel Knight's King Knight lacks such a cue: his spin states with and without bash access share the same animation.

Short, subtle effects confirm every input without heavy juice. Jumps squash and stretch Madeline, landings kick up dust and rumble the controller, and each dash gets a four-frame pause, a tiny screen shake, shadow trails and a white contrail.

The camera wobbles in the same direction as the dash to sell its speed and power. The effects are deliberately short, not a Vlambeer-style juice fest.

Movement was hand-coded and tuned alongside the levels. Matt Thorson and Noel Berry wrote Madeline's movement in Visual Studio with XNA instead of using engine gravity from Unity or Game Maker, so they had precise control over input. Numbers came from intuition, experimentation and constant playtesting.

New level mechanics like bumpers, trampoline clouds and wind forced movement changes, and one character change could force changes to 20 levels, so work was thrown away. Thorson: "let it slowly reveal what it wants to be."

Moving the character should be fun in an empty room. Noel Berry says the room could be empty and moving around should still feel good. Thorson recalls running around Delfino Plaza in Super Mario Sunshine for hours just for fun.

Coyote time and jump buffering keep near-misses from feeling unfair. Madeline can jump a few frames after leaving a ledge, and a jump pressed just before landing is remembered and executed on touchdown.

Noel Berry says a swallowed press feels like the game missed your input: "you want to feel like you're in control of your character." Mark Brown later copied both features from Celeste's movement into his own Mind Over Magnet controller.

Many small special cases make failures feel like the player's own. Spikes have small hitboxes, dashing into a corner slides you around it, traffic light blocks still give momentum on a slightly late press, and a quick climb-jump into a wall jump refunds stamina.

The code holds an "untold number of hacks and special cases". When players fail, they ask how to execute better, not whether they were one frame off.

The same leniency gives experts a high skill ceiling. Speedrunners spend the extra frames on dash-cancels, hyperdashes, ultradashes and wallbounces to cross gaps they aren't meant to. Most techniques were intended and some are taught in the game.

Thorson: "It's like working on the player's intent rather than making it a precise simulation." Speedrunner TGH says the techniques "work so well with the level design."

Game speed control doubles as an accessibility feature. Slowing the whole game loosens timing for players who need more time to process and react, while keeping the challenge's shape intact.

It suits many types of disability, including cognitive and motor ones.

Game speed control doubles as an accessibility feature. Slowing the whole game loosens timing for players who need more time to process and react, while keeping the challenge's shape intact.

It suits many types of disability, including cognitive and motor ones.

Thorson shipped Assist Mode despite feeling it breaks his design. Matt Thorson spent many hours tuning Celeste's difficulty and says Assist Mode breaks the game from a designer's view, but shipped it to empower players.

The mode was inspired by the debate around Cuphead. Thorson: "sometimes that means letting go."

Granular options let players change only what they need. Players can slow the game by 10 percent, get infinite air dashes, make Madeline invincible or skip chapters. Nothing is locked away, and achievements stay available.

Cuphead's Simple Mode, by contrast, cuts boss phases and doesn't count as a win.

A neutral name makes the mode feel like help, not a verdict. The team almost called it cheat mode but felt that was judgemental, since you never know why someone needs it. Super Mario Odyssey later shipped a mode with the same name, which confirmed the choice.

Explain intent and audience before the player turns it on. Celeste says its difficulty is essential, recommends a first playthrough without assists, and says the mode is for players who find the game inaccessible, such as new players, players with disabilities or those who want the story.

Framing lets the game offer opt-outs without spoiling the intended experience; most players never turn it on, and Mark Brown says it might as well not exist for him.

Language, placement and timing signal how much weight a mode carries. Mark Brown argues options against the designer's vision should never sit with the same weight as intended ones; with clear information, players can be trusted to choose.

He holds Celeste and Heat Signature up as models of informing players well, and frames this as his own position in an open debate.

Heat Signature labels optional permadeath and asks players to keep it. Tom Francis added optional permadeath in the first major update, with a label saying turning it off leads to less interesting stories and less variety.

He changed his question from whether the game is better without it to how to help players who hate it.

SOMA released Safe Mode two years after launch. Frictional made a popular fan mod official as Safe Mode, where enemies notice but can't hurt you, delaying it so it would not muddy how the game was meant to be played.