I love Celeste. Over time it has grown to become my favourite game ever, probably. It blends a simple relatable story with gameplay and mechanics that I enjoy so so much. It's challenging and requires you to fail and learn to be able move forward, but it is fair and never asks too much from you. I could write about this game all day long, but the real reason I am writing about it is because I have started to learn how to speedrun through the game.
Konrad Games Done Quick
Sometime during the pandemic a couple coworkers and I were talking about speedrunning. There were enough people at our office that we could potentially host a marathon similar to (although much shorter than) Awesome Games Done Quick. Since our companies initials are KG, it naturally became KGDQ and was a perfect homage to AGDQ. This idea sat on the shelf for quite some time. But, my coworker determined as he is, revived the idea relatively recently and floated it to the people of our company to see if there was interest for people to learn games to run. The idea is: runs that are max 1 hour long to complete, doesn't have to be a competitive time, anyone can learn a short run they're interested in, would be hosted in the office after work for a few hours. There was a pretty positive response and many people were willing to learn a short run for the event.
I have always wanted to learn to speedrun Celeste. Runs at the top level are extremely fast and impressive. It is a game with no random elements and raw skill. This has always made me apprehensive to learn as I felt like I would not actually be doing the game justice and not enjoy the beginning of learning to run it, which is getting through the game relatively slowly. However, KGDQ gave me an opportunity to learn it in a non-threatening environment. The idea of just beating a game that many co-workers have played and is considered difficult would be good enough to be entertaining. With that in mind, I signed up for the event with a caveat where if I found it to be too difficult to get through consistently I would learn a different shorter game.
Setting goals
I knew to actually learn to speedrun Celeste I would need to tackle it in very small chunks and set very reasonable goals that I believed I could actually hit. My main goal that I set for myself was to have a ~50 minute average run time before the marathon. This plays within the hour time limit as well as giving me a buffer to make mistakes so we don't have to mercy kill the run. Another goal I have is to actually start being able to do full runs by the end of the year. Practicing and doing individual levels is great, but bing able to do everything together and in a row for an hour is another thing. With those in mind, I started to learn.
Diving in
The very first thing I did before anything was go to YouTube and search for "celeste speedrun tutorial". I was very worried as I expected pretty much everything to be extremely dry, dull, and boring. I also really didn't want to just watch videos of this is how you get through this room and then try and learn every room from a video. My search results ended up being a playlist of presumably every chapter in detail and a couple videos on basic mechanics and a sub 1 hour guide. Just what I want.
I started off with watching the basic mechanics guide even though I knew about wavedashing, hyperdashing, and all that fun stuff. I didn't plan on trying to incorporate those too much unless I had to. During my initial watch all I could think of was wow, I was wrong about tutorials being dry and boring. This video was awesome and had a wealth of knowledge. The person who made was also very entertaining and made everything approachable. Being kind of hyped up after that video, I watched their video on going for a sub 1 hour time . This video was EXACTLY what I wanted. A high level overview of getting through the game, without a ton of required tech, to hit a reasonable sub 1 hour time. They went through chapter by chapter, outlining the route you want to talk, but not the route in every room. They stressed the importance of practicing going through rooms your own way you are comfortable with to minimize deaths. They also went over problem rooms and good strats to get through them safely and easily. After this video I immediately got the mods and tools that they recommended to practice and started messing around in Celeste.
The learning process
Before starting my speedrunning journey I really thought I would dislike the learning process. But I've really been enjoying it so far. Doing chapters in small chunks to practice and then putting them together to do a full run of the chapter has been rewarding. Making my own strats to get through room safely and quickly has been extremely fun. It's almost like a sub game within the greater game.
One other thing about the learning process that I have enjoyed quite a bit is looking for skips on my own. There have been a few times on certain screens where I have thought I think I can make that jump which skips the intended way to do the screen, or in some cases even multiple screens. I managed to find a skip in chapter 5 and develop a set up for it that saves me from needing to travel through 2 additional screens.
Closing thoughts
So far everything about speedrunning Celeste has been awesome. The learning, the self improvement, the strategy making, everything. I am looking forward to the KGDQ marathon and hope I can have a good entertaining run developed for early February. I will likely be posting more progress blog posts as time goes on so keep on a look out for those.