Zack Lacy
Challenge Wednesday Writer
Geometry Dash is a popular indie game developed by Swedish developer Robert “Robtop” Topala. It has gameplay that consists of players navigating through 1-3 minute music-based levels, dodging obstacles such as spikes and pits, clicking with either mouse, pressing the spacebar, pressing the up key or tapping their screen to jump over them. Since the game was released in 2013, it has gained immense popularity in addition to millions of user created levels, which millions of people have played.
The Gameplay
Geometry Dash’s gameplay is likely its most simple element. As previously mentioned, there is one only control in the game - jumping, although that isn’t the only thing to the gameplay. During a level, players will enter several portals, switching their game mode to things from a spaceship to a mechanical spider. There are currently 7 game modes in Geometry Dash: Cube, Ship, Ball, UFO, Wave, Robot and Spider, as well as the upcoming Swing copter. All of this makes for enjoyable and unpredictable gameplay for players to sight read.
The content and progression
There is no doubt that Geometry Dash is packed with content. Although most players will generally start with the 21 main levels made by the creator; there are millions more user created levels for them to improve their skill. This is widely agreed upon to be the game’s biggest strength. For example, a standard progression of skill would be to complete Stereo Madness, (the easiest level) while slowly completing gradually difficult progressing levels, from Clutterfunk, to Clubstep, to Deadlocked, Nine Circles and Windy Landscape. Players will eventually reach Acu, a level that is universally played as a first Extreme Demon (the hardest difficulty in the game) across the community. However, they can keep increasing their skill from there and complete some of the hardest levels in the game, like Silent Clubstep or Abyss of Darkness, levels on top of the demon list. (A list of the hardest levels in the game).
Yet, that isn’t even all the content - there are 17 map packs containing levels from some of the first updates in the game that also slowly progress in difficulty. Gauntlets are a similar concept to this - they contain 5 themed levels in a newer-ish style with rewards bestowed upon completion, unlocking new icons in the icon kit of 148 icons, with more to come. With all of this entertainment, Robtop still plans for more updates containing useful tools for the level editor and new main and story content. This includes more gauntlets and map packs.
History of Geometry Dash
All the way back in 2013, Geometry Dash update 1.0 was released by Robert Topala. Like most games, the player base was tiny compared to today, and the game didn’t have much replay value, partly due to it being a “copy” of The Impossible Game. However, there is one feature that solely separates the game from anything else - the editor. Soon Robert began developing monthly updates. 1.1 was first, adding new objects into the editor, a new main level - Time Machine, and the mirror portal, which flips the screen upon entering it. Next up was 1.2, adding in Cycles, more objects to the editor (of course), and most importantly, the ball gamemode, which moves to the top of the screen with a click. Quite surprisingly, this is the most important in the game, despite only being the second, and there is only one reason why.
In Geometry Dash, there are 7 difficulties. Auto, Easy, Normal, Hard, Harder, Insane and Demon. However, Geometry Dash 1.0 has 5 difficulties. The less important difficulty of the two (possibly being the least important in the game behind non-rated levels) is auto, being added after many players began creating automatic levels, using jump pads and gravity switching portals. In contrast, demons are the most important difficulty, even to the point of players saying you haven’t experienced the game if you haven’t experienced a demon, and players ignoring regular levels. As you may have guessed, this was added in update 1.2. Despite auto having a fairly unimpressive backstory, demon has an intriguing one.
It all started when user M2coL uploaded level “Demon Park” to the servers, hoping for the highest difficulty, insane. It was well-received having the advantage of being a tremendously hard level (at the time) and being noticed by Robtop. His thoughts on the levels were quite different to M2coL’s visions, being that it was much harder than any insane level. In the honour of it being absolutely soul-crushing, it was given its very own difficulty - Demon.
Besides Demon Park, a plethora of early demon levels were dislike bombed. ‘To The Grave’ was one, being even harder than Demon Park, and its like-to-dislike ratio was heavily lopsided. One reason for this was Geometry Dash being a rage game, and these levels made people scream like mad, being the behemoths of stages they are. Hence, they dislike and never even attempt to make an effort on progressing, unlike most players do today. In short, the levels were so hard that they were unplayable to 99% of the playerbase.
Moving on, update 1.3-1.8 came and went, and while 1.9 was memorable with unforgettable players such as Riot, Michigun and Cyclic (this user was later accused for hacking but he still won’t ever be forgotten by the community), the golden age didn't last and 2.0 added irritating and ridiculous moving objects. After this update, this is when the hiatuses started creeping in. 2.1 took a whopping 17 months after 2.0, a new record for the game. After this, disaster struck. Once update 2.2’s waiting time surpassed 2.1’s waiting time, people began speculating on what was causing this massive delay. Since then, robtop has stated that he just had so many ideas for the update that he kept adding and adding until it got out of hand. Fortunately, robtop is only focusing on the features he has implemented now, rather than adding more. He has stated to have plans to release the update this year and the community is excited due to the 5 year wait.
How the game has survived 5 years with no updates
Now after the last paragraph, you might be wondering what mad tricks Robtop played to sustain his community to keep playing the game. But in reality, he didn’t really do anything. The only reason that the game stayed alive is that the community ran it. Normally, it would be an absurd idea to let players run your game, but between the level editor and the feature of online player-made levels, it just fits perfectly for Geometry Dash. The game has evolved so much in gameplay skill and creator skill that it looks like a completely different game now. Take Silent Clubstep for example. As I mentioned in a previous paragraph, it is one of the hardest levels in the game. This was not always the case though, as this level was for the longest time thought to be impossible. Players could barely get practice attempts under 1000, let alone completing the level in one try; but, as the community evolved, people got better and better until they verified levels harder than Silent Clubstep. In addition, with the tools in the editor, user Spu7nix has made a level with only 29 objects, the average being around 40,000. It is an understatement to say that the community has become talented, making full games and full recreations of games with just the 2.1 editor! Nobody knows what levels will look like in 2.2, other than that it will be revolutionary.
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