Celeste Developer's Metroidvania Game Skytorn Canceled

Published: January 2, 2019 9:59 AM /

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skytorn canceled

Celeste developer Matt Makes Games Inc. has announced the cancellation of Skytorn. This decision came to pass after the team behind the game encountered some difficulties in bringing this game to fruition.

Skytorn was a game being put together by a team of four people and one additional group. Noel Berry was on programming and technical art, Amora Bettany was on character design and portraits, Pedro Medeiros handled programming and gameplay art, Ben Prunty covered the music, and the Power Up Audio team took care of sound design. It was in the works prior to the development of Celeste, but their mountain-climbing adventure turned out to be a much more popular venture that ate up a year of potential development time for Skytorn.

The question that immediately comes to mind is this: why was Skytorn canceled? In a post on Medium, Mr. Berry explains that there were a number of factors that led to the cancellation of the game. At its heart, Skytorn was supposed to be a procedurally-generated Metroidvania. That idea proved complicated to implement when considering the story. How do you allow for a traditional linear progression of a Metroidvania game when the world is randomly assembled?

This issue with procedural generation was a paradox that they were unable to overcome in the game's current form. An assessment of what they had so far led to the conclusion that making Skytorn a viable game would necessitate a complete rework of most of the game's core components. As a result, the developers canceled development of the game. It was expected to release for the PC, Mac, and PlayStation 4.

The team behind Skytorn is hard at work on a new game, although they're not quite ready to share details on their next project. We can expect to hear an announcement from them sometime this year.

Are you upset to find Skytorn canceled by the developers of Celeste? Do you think they would have been able to make the game work or were the design issues too severe to overcome? Let us know in the comments below!

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One of my earliest memories is playing Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I've had a controller in my hand since I was 4 and I… More about Robert N