Thank you very much!

I've no idea how other games (eg. SMW) have handled this but I think there's a chance it'll always be just a little easier to find/FMOD an arbitrary song yourself than get someone to make a cover of it for celeste... a section of the Asset Drive for audio is an appealing idea either way though

can we get some cooking tips

I do find this really interesting actually since Celeste doesn't render more than >128ish onscreen lights at once and allegedly sometimes less? It's still usually way more than enough but I wonder if the technique got altered at some point

I think the biggest takeaway I have from this level is that this sort of “cryptic” puzzle should always try to be as friendly & easy as it can. I’m not kidding that EVERY puzzle in this level was harder at some point in development, but very little was lost in making any of them simpler.

I felt the need to sprite an additional flower color, as well as hanging flowers, since I wanted to draw attention away from the purple lilac. The flowers are also often grouped into similar colors, because that also makes the groups of purple fit in more.

The trees all belong to spooooky; for each one I spirited 3 or 4 variants with more yellow/orange leaves. Each tree in the level is one decal with 5 flag decals on top of it, and there are savefile-persistent flags set to progress as the player hits certain milestones.

I've heard that the level is a bit under-decorated. This is true; I underscoped decoration since I was so worried about getting the trees to change color as you progress through the level. In the end, partially thanks to lonn layers (a lifesaver) it was easier than I expected.

I consider fall to be one of the most difficult aesthetics to nail in a celeste level; nothing ever really matches going outside in the fall and staring in awe at individual trees (yes I do this). I don’t think this level succeeds either, but I do think specific parts capture some aspect of it.

There also used to be a challenge with the extended variant “lava/ice everywhere” (it swaps when you dash, it’s super cool and very underused). It was a fun twist but it made the vertical room way too hard (and playtesters noted that it ruined the atmosphere).

Early on I came up with the idea of having a knowledge check in the form of doing part of the map grabless, instead of a dash code. I loved this idea of imposing challenges on gameplay you’ve done many times (kind of like the Forgotten unlock in TBoI), so I did it a bunch in the level.

I knew from KTaNE that if the SFX puzzle’s message was too long, it’d be annoying; but too fast, it’d be hard to parse the morse. I shortened the message from FIND LAVENDER to NEAR LILAC; NEAR is shorter than FIND in morse.

The SFX puzzle itself has also been in my head for several years; now felt like a good time for it, though I think maybe I should’ve included other similar puzzles. The shape is a FEZ reference because it’s the first geometry I placed then I never felt the need to change it.

There’s a post joking about puzzle-game conlangs being just encrypted english. The blue text came from reading this and imagining such a “conlang” turning out to be simple obfuscation, like bad handwriting. This idea had stuck in my head for some time before starting work on the level.

Originally, the SFX puzzle gave the hint about the blue text; and the blue text led to the hidden signs. This got flipped after some playtesters figured out the blue text immediately, and the blue text was made more clear (though it probably could still have used a more distinct single hint)

In retrospect it probably would’ve been a good idea to have helpful hints for the other path if the player got too far down a single one only. A lot of people do end up stumbling on hidden signs by chance and I think a lot of that is from lack of guidance.

I really wanted players to have multiple “routes” through the puzzle flowchart, so if they’re stuck on one puzzle they can still make progress elsewhere. I did include several gates to make sure they never fell too far behind either path, though.

I gave myself a certain deadline to get all the puzzles implemented, and stuff like the "paintings clue" didn’t make the cut. The colors in the picture are to help me track my progress implementing each puzzle. It stopped getting updated after a while though.