my cchristmas story or: mods and placing thoughts onto media
spoilers for Salt, my celeste mod and christmas calendar submission.
recently i participated in the celeste classic christmas calendar, an event where community members (many of whom are close friends of mine) submit a celeste modding project to an advent calendar that releases one community creation every day. here is the link. if there is one event that bundles up the joy i feel for the folks i have met in this community, it is this one.
when i first joined it was intimidating to be in the same space as so many thoughtful, kind, and skilled people. thinking this way was immature and fragile but the feeling of admiration is something that lingers with me to this day. i look up to everyone i have talked to. folks that come to mind are flyingpenguin223, kdx, koipondx86, bacon_good, petthepetra, wisper, meep_moop, merl, glug27, cominixo, gonengazit, lord snek, feetballer, nick, rubyred, and yellowtyper. i am sure there are many more.
this year was the first that i ended up putting sustained effort toward, which carried with it something i would like to talk about.
i am surprised every time i play someone else's creation how much of their thoughts you can see by interacting with what they've made, closest to speaking with someone on the other end of a wall. you can easily hear the loudest, strongest thoughts and other, quieter thoughts require careful attention.
thinking about what i could submit before november was mostly fruitless, but it served as a useful foundation. i wanted the player to pause and think if only for a moment. a passage from a webnovel lingered heavily in my mind, which felt silly. webnovels often lack depth and lean into stereotypes as a nature of their creation. Regressor's Tale of Cultivation by Tremendous certainly does check these boxes. it is formulaic, and the portrayal of women is laughable at times, but a certain piece of it stood out to me.
as a "regression" novel, the protagonist goes through a series of "lifetimes" that vary wildly. one of them is particularly memorable and the foundation for the mod i made. i will refer to it as "the 10th return". it is the meeting of the protagonist Seo Eun-hyun and the character Buk Hyang-hwa, an artisan. i would like to quote a section from chapter 129 (the ending of the 10th return):
-----------------------------------------
Just like the festival back then, I bring my hand to her face.
Without the veil, my fingertips lightly brush her face.
Our fingertips touch again.
The sky is purple.
The sunset is fading, and the night sky is beginning to rise.
We take three steps to the right, completing another circle.
Our fingertips brush several times, and finally, we return to our original positions.
Drip, drip…
Tears fall.
Surprisingly, its not the black tears I have shed for 200 years.
For the first time in 200 years, I am crying clear tears.
I look at Hwang-hwa in a daze.
“I can’t imagine living in a world without you.”
In the next life, perhaps for countless lives,
I might just commit suicide without thinking.
“I just… want to die.”
I want to kneel before the heavens.
Begging with my hands, pleading,
Please, please kill me.
Now, I truly wish to die.
-----------------------------------------
there is no particular reason for why this passage stuck with me. perhaps it is due to the telling of the dance and the overlaid love and sadness, the jarring self-destructive infatuation that decouples the world from the protagonist.
Hyang-hwa is already dead in this scene. The protagonist is dancing with a vision or spirit. This nature of abandoning oneself for one's responsibilities repeats itself in the story, and became the foundation for my submission's secret ending. The rest of the elements come from other parts of the story, namely Gwak Am and a similar abandonment and devotion that causes Iris (the player character) to erase the world.
as someone inexperienced in Lua and the celeste modding medium as a whole, i heavily limited the scope of the project. the focus is a select few tiles that are affected by an "eye" item, representing Gwak Am's gaze or attention. by changing where the eye looks, you move salt blocks and "unblocks" around to accomplish player objectives. in celeste the player objectives are either to collect a collectible or leave the level through the top of the screen.
now to finally address one of the titles - a game is an unusual way to tell someone what you are thinking. with the open-ended mechanic that ended up being featured, the challenge was structuring a level such that the player needs to either 1) place themself into an uncomfortable situation to open up a path or 2) act with foresight to remove or place objects to facilitate an objective. to be clear i know nothing about game design and this philosophy is flawed but it was fun to work with.
next blog post in approximately some time.