Skytorn canceled, Celeste team "working on something new"

Indie studios typically don't have a large amount of resources to dedicate to multiple projects, so it has to hurt a bit more when something in development has to get shut down. Matt Makes Games, the publisher behind Celeste and Towerfall Ascension, is canceling metroidvania Skytorn. The development team behind Celeste is working on something new, but not talking about just yet. Here's an excerpt from developer Noah Berry's blog post on the cancelation:

"As some of you may know before our game Celeste a lot of the team was working on a procedurally generated metroidvania called Skytorn. Since Celeste we’ve been pretty quiet about the game as we figured out what we wanted to do with it."

"I’m going to cut to the important thing first: We’re no longer going to be finishing Skytorn. I’ll go into the details behind the history of the game, and why we’ve come to this decision. I’m really sorry for those of you who were excited about this game. We were too. We poured a lot of time, energy, and heart into the project and we’re definitely sad it’s never going to see the commercial release we were hoping for."

Skytorn, like Celeste before it, was being developed by a significantly small indie team. The crew included Noel Berry, Amora Bettany, Pedro Medeiros, Ben Prunty, and Power Up Audio. Because of this, it makes sense that the team would move on from a questionable project, especially considering the limited resources of small teams.

Noel Berry, in the Medium blog post about Skytorn's cancelation, says the main reason for dropping the game is that it "just never figured out what it was" after several years of development. "To its core, it was a procedurally generated adventure game without permadeath, but the procedural elements always clashed with the Metroidvania themes, and I didn’t know how to design around that," he said.

Berry says the Celeste team will have news to share sometime in 2019, so stay tuned to Shacknews for additional updates.