A short thread on a few Celeste game-feel things :) I don't think we invented any of these.
1- Coyote time. You can still jump for a short time after leaving a ledge.
1- Coyote time. You can still jump for a short time after leaving a ledge.
2- Jump buffering. If you press and hold the jump button a short time before landing, you will jump on the exact frame that you land.
3- Halved gravity jump peak. This one is hard to see. If you hold the jump button, the top of your jump has half gravity applied. It's subtle, but this gives you more time to adjust for landing, and also just looks/feels pleasant.
4- Jump corner correction. If you bonk your head on a corner, the game tries to wiggle you to the side around it.
5- Dash corner correction. Also tough to see, but if you dash sideways and clip a corner, it'll pop you up onto the ledge.
6- We also pop you up onto semi-solid platforms if you dash sideways through them.
7- Lift momentum storage. Jumping off a fast-moving platform adds the platform's momentum to your jump's speed. Madeline "stores" this momentum and will still get the boosted jump for a few frames after the platform has stopped.
8- You can actually wall jump 2 pixels from a wall. (That sounds tiny but this is a 320x180-resolution game :P)
9- If you're doing a "super wall jump" (ie: a wall jump while dashing upward), this is a more precise and demanding maneuver so we let you do it from even further away (I think it's 5 pixels, which is more than half a tile!)
10- And this final one is complicated but very important for Celeste. Some setup: If you're grabbing a wall and jump straight upward, that consumes a lot of stamina. But if you jump away from the wall, that's a normal wall jump that uses no stamina and pushes you away strongly...
...So if you perform the straight upward jump, then press away from the wall shortly after, the game refunds the stamina spent by the upward jump, and applies the horizontal wall jump force. It converts from one jump type to the other after the fact.
You might have noticed a pattern! All are centered around widening timing/positioning windows, so that everything is fudged a tiny bit in the player's favor. I think this is a big reason why Celeste can feel kind even though it's very difficult - it wants you to succeed.
