Pico-8 Celeste Update #1 – The Game Plan

Hi everyone!

Work on my Celeste-OST-Pico-8-remake has begun.  If you don’t know Lena Raine, she didn’t an amazing job producing the soundtrack.  You can listen to it here.  

The game Celeste, was released January 2018 and was incredibly successful.  It ALSO originally started as a Pico-8 game.  This is one of the reasons for choosing to remake Celeste’s soundtrack – to see (and hear) it come full circle!

This is going to be a big project, and will take a few months, but I’ve started to work out all the steps.

Sheet Music

The first step is transcribing the entire soundtrack.  This is listening to each track and translating it to sheet music that can be read.  I use Finale to produce sheet music.

I enjoy transcribing, but it’s very monotonous work. In the end though, having a transcription will help me focus on the creative stuff when I start work in Pico-8.  It disrupts the workflow to be constantly switching between transcribing, inputting notes in Pico-8, and then being creative with it.

The other reason I’ll be producing sheet music is because it gives me more stuff to share with everybody here.  Some of you may read music, and play an instrument, so hopefully the sheet music will be of interest to you.  If you DON’T read music, seeing the sheet music and the Pico-8 projects could be helpful to start learning. 

Pico-8 Carts

There are a few ways I could arrange the music in Pico-8. It’s important before I start that I set clear “rules” for the purpose of this music.  For example, will this be used in a Pico-8 game?  Depending, I’d have to arrange in 2 or 3-channels. 

So, I’ve decided that the purpose of this remake is for listening – not a Pico-8 game. I want to make this as sonically interesting as possible.  Also, for each track, I’ll allow myself to use multi carts.  Listening to the original soundtrack, some tracks may need four or five carts!

Sometimes it’s tempting to export sounds from Pico-8 and then manipulate them in say, Ableton.  But for this Celeste remake, I won’t be using any tools outside of Pico-8. Everything you hear will have been made within the 4-channel Pico-8 environment.  

Pacing

There are 21 tracks that make up the Celeste soundtrack. With clear end goals, I tend to rush through projects and am susceptible to burnout.  So, at least to start, the goal is to only work on this for a couple hours a day.  Knowing me, as I get closer to the finish line, I’ll probably be tempted to push that to 4-6 hours, but I’m going to do my best resisting that!

It’s hard to know for sure, but I think I can finish the transcriptions in a couple weeks.  Some of the tracks are more complex than others, so it’s difficult to know how long it will take to produce the Pico-8 music.  My rough estimate is a couple months.  

I’ll be sending out (Patron-only) updates weekly or bi-weekly, depending on how much ‘stuff’ I have to share.  But you can expect the first few updates to be full of sheet music. Eventually that will transition to Pico-8 carts and WIPs.

Thanks for reading, more updates soon!

Chris / Gruber