Our first blog post, and our first day live on Steam. A look at what Celas Studio does, why we chose Early Access, and what's next.

Hi, we're Celas Studio, and this is our first blog post ever, so please excuse us if it reads a little different from what a "real" launch announcement is supposed to sound like. We're not a marketing team, we're the people who built the thing, and we just watched it go live on Steam a few hours ago. We are still kind of vibrating.

So let's just talk.

What is Celas Studio, actually

If you've landed here without context: Celas Studio is a 2D animation app. Vector shapes, painted raster cells, bone rigs, a timeline, a camera, all in one project, one canvas, one license. No plugin marketplace, no "upgrade to unlock rigging" paywall three months in. You get the whole toolset from day one.

We built it because we kept bouncing between apps to make a single character move. Draw here, rig there, deform somewhere else, composite in a fourth thing. Every handoff lost something: a stray pixel, an hour of patience, sometimes the whole afternoon. Celas Studio exists because we got tired of that and decided the fix was to just... not switch apps.

A few things we're genuinely proud of:

  • Bone dynamics & wind physics. Rig a character, and secondary motion (hair, cloth, that one dangly earring) happens on its own instead of you keyframing every strand by hand.
  • Mesh deform. Grab any piece of art and warp it with a control grid, no redraw required.
  • Vector + raster living together. Shape layers and painted layers on the same canvas, because most of us don't work in just one or the other.
  • A real timeline. Per-channel curves, easing, split and trim. Not a toy.

None of it is locked behind a higher tier. It's all just... there.

Why Early Access, and why now

Because it's not finished, and we'd rather be honest about that than pretend otherwise. Version 0.9 is stable enough to make real work in, but there are panels that will move, workflows that will get smoother, and almost certainly a few things you'll run into and go "huh, that's weird." We want to hear about those. That's the whole point of doing this in the open instead of disappearing for another year and reappearing with a "finished" 1.0 that never actually talked to the people using it.

The first few hours

We won't pretend this is some huge launch. It's small, it's quiet, and honestly that's fine. This is day one of something we plan to be working on for a long time, not a fireworks show. A handful of people have already picked it up, wishlists are ticking up, and somewhere out there someone is rigging their first character in it right now, which is a genuinely strange thing to sit with.

What's next

We're going to be around: in the Steam community hub, in Discord, reading every bit of feedback that comes in through #i-need-feed-back. If something breaks, tell us. If something's confusing, tell us. If something works and you made something cool with it, please, please tell us, we would love to see it.

Thanks for being here for the first post. There will be more, hopefully less nervous ones.

The Celas Studio team

Celas Studio is available now on Steam, in Early Access.