How I made an Infinite Geometry Dash Level

in Geometry Dash levels are pretty linear they scroll from left to right until you get far enough to reach the end and beat the level but what if there was a level that challenged that idea this is my level infinity and as the name suggests it is actually infinite if you play the level normally you will Loop over and over and over again forever so how do you actually beat it there's a lot of insane stuff going on with this level behind the scenes that I'm very excited to talk about so let me Begin by telling you the story of how it all started a few months back I had a weird idea for level the name would be escape and the whole idea was that you had to escape through a secret way to actually beat the level or else it would repeat forever for a while I didn't end up doing it partially because I didn't quite know how I'd pull it off but one day when I was bored I decided to test some things out and see if something along the lines of an infinite level was actually possible you see 2.2 added an interesting trigger that most people kind of gloss over the teleport trigger this allows a player to be teleported to any spot in the level instantly setting one of these at the end of a level putting your desk ation as an object at the very start and toggling touch triggered and multi-trigger on the teleporter allows someone to play the exact same part of a level over and over again with no other special triggers or setups needed pairing this with another 2.2 trigger the song trigger meant that you could effectively create a true Loop of the same part over and over again with this knowledge in mind and having found the perfect song for a level like this Infinity by froms I began my new level Infinity then the decoration process began with with an idea this strange I felt an eerie and mysterious atmosphere be perfect so I started creating and in about a single night I had an intro for the level with a spooky message and the base for the first part I started out with a dark blue phasing glow background an overlay and some very Neo Desy structures I sent this as well as the idea itself around to a few friends and I caught the eye of one Creator in particular Comet face if you're familiar with the work of comet face already you should be able to recognize their influence in this level to an extent since I've always been super inspired by their work well as it turned out they had a similar idea for an infinitely looping level a while back so they agreed to help out on the project when I needed it which was awesome an enormous Thanks goes to Comet face for their help on the project as a whole I was able to consult them for ideas and opinions many times and if you're wondering what they actually built in the level it was this little foreground area move effect in the final part from there decoration continued pretty smoothly I started on this crazy looking infinite Parallax for the second part using gradient triggers each side of every structure here consists of two dots each on a unique group and using a gradient trigger with settings stating that the bottom two corners are the corners of the sides and the tops are a center object that follows the center of the camera you get this incredibly convincing looking 3d effect doing this for an entire part sounds daunting and it kind of was but thanks to build Helper and just keeping track of which gradient triggers went to which sides it wasn't too bad and looking at it I think it was absolutely worth it this is such a crazy looking effect afterwards I got some design help from ARB added some polishing details like these flashing symbols then moved on on to the final part for this part at first all of my ideas sucked honestly other than the background which I knew I wanted to be a circle scaling up and a circle scaling down on the beat I first did this with a scaling Loop and two glow circles but unfortunately scaling and moving in this game is a wicked combo and after about 1 second the background would go off center instead I recreated the glow effect with a particle trigger which I could activate simply using an animate trigger it might be slightly laggier but on the technical level it was much simpler and it still looked really nice after a few days of tweaks and brainstorming the part was finished and honestly I think it turned out incredibly visually striking which is cool I ended up still using these circle designs i' hadd come up with earlier but I placed them in a far less structured way and gave them this weird follow trigger based movement which added to the chaotic atmosphere of the part other than that in adding a classic audio visual follow trigger effect in the second half the part was done and so was the level or so I thought in reality I was much more ambitious with this project than I probably should have been I had so many ideas for it and while I think everything ended up awesome in the end and I'm glad I did what I did it was certainly an undertaking first single project let's get into some of the first extra things I did for the level first I had an idea for the ending of the loop where the whole screen goes white right before teleporting you back to the start I wanted to make a voice line saying go back to match this text but even with a huge sound effect Library I don't think there would have been anything there fitting my idea on top of that my idea for the ending cut scene involved the title appearing on screen one chunk at a time with a voice that said the name out loud alongside it so I definitely had to come up with a unique solution to do this I went into FL Studio used the text to speech plug-in to create a voice saying go and uploaded it to New GRS of course you can't just upload anything to Newgrounds and use it in GD like that but thankfully I had other songs on my account that proved I was in fact a real musician so I was able to get whitelisted with that prepared I put the vocals into the level with song triggers and oh my gosh when I tell you I popped off so hard after hearing it for the first time I really do think that the voice lines sound design wise were some of the best additions I ever made for this level however with all of this out of the way the biggest challenge still remained making the infinite level actually work making a level Loop is simple in concept but in actual execution in Geometry rash it is brutal but about 2 weeks in I started chipping away at it here's how it all works when you teleport at the end of the level all it really does is send you back to the very start but in a bit of a tricky State you see every trigger in the level has already been activated but on top of that every movement or rotation that has happened has still taken place so for example if any object followed the player for any period of time it was now off in some random location across the level this meant that not only would every trigger have to be respawned but they would also have to have their actions reset before starting over again all of this was confusing at first but doable with patience first things first though I had to set up a way to begin the loop of triggers to do that I have a touch toggled spawn trigger at the very beginning of the level set to spawn or essentially activate triggers set to group three this way we could put every trigger we need to loop on group three and they would all get activated eventually spawn triggers got a few neat new additions in 2.2 one of them being this handy option called spawn ordered clicking the setting makes every trigger on group three activate in the order they're placed in the editor when spawned this is basically the only way this level was possible at all if it didn't exist I would have had to time every single trigger out manually using Ultra specific delays between them big shout outs to spawn order for real since this starting spawn trigger is touch toggled and multi-trigger it makes it super straightforward to reactivate every time you teleport back to the beginning since all it needs is for the player to touch it to activate it again with a basic setup in place it was time to start making every trigger reset at some point in the level for triggers like toggle triggers Alpha triggers or pulse triggers it was fairly easy since once you found out what object the trigger was affecting you could place triggers doing the opposite right before said object appears to make sure it's always in the right State when you get to it again however movement based triggers are where it gets scarier some movements like ones with specific distance values were easy to reset since you could just find the end point of the movement and have it do the opposite movement once it's finished to move it back into place a problem arises with lock to player based movements though these don't move a distance they move for a time so you will never get a specific distance to move a player lock object back to reset it because of this glaring oversight and planning by me I had to come up with a workaround this workaround thankfully uses more obscure features of existing triggers instead of just making object X locked to the player for 5 seconds I instead made a new object object Y and a third object object Z which will act as a starting point essentially then I made object y locked to the player instead and had object X follow its movements using a follow trigger by making the follow time slightly longer than how long the object actually locks to the player for as soon as the movement ends I can quickly move object y back to object Z using the target mode option in the move trigger this way our main object that we want to lock to the player object X follows object y right back to its starting point object Z lining itself up perfectly to happen again that might have been a lot to take in but basically it made it so that any movement was technically possible to reset oh and fun fact levels use a lot of lock to player X movements so I had to do this probably 100 more times throughout the level along the way fun over the course of about 2 weeks though I was slowly but surely making good progress making sure everything in the level would Loop properly it was a lot of checking triggers testing tweaking testing again failing and eventually succeeding in doing it properly this level in the editor became quite a mess but it worked and that's all that really matters once every trigger reset at some point I could put all of the triggers I needed on group three the group that spawns on at the start and each trigger in the level would activate in order as you played and and then over and over again every time you teleported back and finally the level was actually infinite now that the looping part was done it was time to work on the Escape my original plan was for the only way to actually beat the level be quote unquote escaping through secret ways I wanted to find some weird out ofpl structure in the level phase through it and float up through space breaking the infinite Loop if you want to try this level out for yourself I would recommend skipping to here in the video to avoid me talking about spoilers for the ending to the level before I begin putting the secret ways into the level I had a few guidelines I didn't want the level solution to just be a wild goose chase so at the very least I knew that for each secret way I would want something to be out of place or missing so that if the player was observant enough they could find it before even realizing they had to as an extra and even more obvious hint I wanted to create hint art or essentially just a drawing of the location of the secret way to make sure the player had some idea of where to go each part has unique structuring so I had hoped seeing the art would at least hint to which part it was on top of this I didn't want to make the level a free win if you watched a video so I did want to somehow make which secret way you got on your tempt random hence why I wanted to make multiple with those rules for myself in place I started looking for spots that would make for good secret ways because yeah unfortunately I didn't already have them figured out while I was building it's fine the first secret way I made was here in the robot I found a cool trick where you could skip this first green orb hit the second one late land beneath this bottom platform and fall all the way through the top one which was exactly the vibe I wanted for my secret ways the platform you fell through was the only one you couldn't touch normally that didn't have spikes on it which was my little indication for it as mentioned earlier since there are only really three parts I made a second one in the first Cube where you have to fall into a structure at the bottom of the screen where a glowball is missing and finally in the ending part I had one in between these pretty obvious looking Spike structures where all you have to do is drop between them easily my least creative one but come on look what I had to work with with the three ways decided it was time to make the ending sequence with a set of consisting of a spawn trigger and a big array of effects and position setups I had the player fall off screen onto a platform play a little glitch effect using shaders and edit song triggers to make it sound Eerie at the same time and I sneakily set the player falling in super slow speed with low gravity in the center of the screen and threw together a quick space background to fill some space then after the player sits and listens to sound effect wind for about 10 seconds I have the title appear setby set alongside the sick custom voice line I made earlier finally with a sharp cut to Black the ending sequence was finished and I think it is easily the most striking ending to any level I've ever made using voice lines like this is so much easier now with a song trigger and I really hope I see more levels use it in the future because the potential is truly endless this setup is right above the second secret way though and since I didn't want to copy all of this over for the other two I instead remotely spawned it when you took the first or the third secret ways then teleported the player to above the second part rotated the camera so it looked like the player was falling downwards to be consistent and rotated the title screen as well so it wasn't upside down it took a lot of tweaking for it to work but once it was done all three of my secret ways now had sick ending cut scenes all right I have the level looping forever and now I even have the secret ways what else is there even to do well with a level like this a lot of logical issues come into play like what if the player just discovers a secret way on accident and beats the level in 30 seconds obviously I don't want players to completely cheese my level without at least knowing what happened so some sort of anti-che method had to be implemented the simplest way of doing this I thought would be to make the secret ways only open up after you Loop through the level once doing this was somewhat straightforward at the very end of the level I created a pickup trigger that only activates once the very first time you reach it and it increments this number right here by one at the same time I made this number have item persistence meaning that if you ever died and restarted the level this number would still be the same value if it was ever one in the past this way I had a value to call back to and check if the player has ever made it through the first Loop simply by checking if this number was one so to make the secret ways inactive until looping there is an instant count trigger at the start which checks exactly once for if this value is one and if it isn't the whole setup for choosing which secret way is active gets toggled off speaking of which randomizing which secret way the player gets has quite the process as well it all stems from this Advanced random trigger which very simply spawns one of these three spawn triggers each with a 33% chance of happening so no secret way is more likely than the others these the spawn triggers then activate a group for each different possible outcome it activates a pickup trigger that enables State either 1 2 or three state one is the first secret way state two is the second and state three is the third the state the level is in is indicated with this little number here being item id1 using pickup triggers for this is super easy since we can just have them activate on spawn and set our number to be exactly what it needs to be this way we can have a readable number to tell what state we are in and what actually needs to happen during it I also have item edit trigger on our setup which sets item id 1 to be zero right before any of this happens so that the number doesn't just keep getting bigger every time we add a value to it trying to change it in hindsight I absolutely could have just used item edit triggers for everything here instead of pickup but that's the 2.1 Creator in me I also only learned how to use the item edit trigger for this specific function so it is what it is it ended up working anyway so it's all right all this really does is tell us a state though and obviously we wouldn't want the secret ways opening before we even get to them so at the end of the level I have instant count triggers for each of the three possible states that set everything up for when you loot these check for which number our item id 1 is and accordingly toggle some things off to make the secret ways open up essentially since all of the state values become item persistent at the end once you Loop you can die or reset as many times as you want and you will still have the same secret way imagine how annoying it would be if you finally looped through the level only to die before actually figuring out where your secret way is and all of the sudden you have to do the whole thing again and you you don't even get the same secret way that would be frustrating and I did not want that to happen now that I had the basic system for making and checking the state for the secret ways I had to put everything together for them to be switched between firstly I added hit boxes to every secret way so you would die on the first attempt and I used instant count triggers at the end to toggle the right one off for your state so you could actually enter whichever secret way you got I also made a short special animation for dying to a secret way on your first attempt to serve as an additional hint if the player discovers it by accident finally I designed and play hint art for each secret way into the level to show up once you've looped one in each part and which set is visible is determined right at the start once you've looped using these sets of instant count setups so now once the player Loops the level checks which state you're in either 1 2 or three and changes the level accordingly cool it only took 8 hours now we were in the end game though the most difficult parts of the process were complete since the level was actually infinite and the secret ways were set up to function properly now it was time to do some fun stuff one big problem I still had left was that the percentage in the level would be super misleading after all it would start counting up giving the impression that the level was in fact not infinite and eventually it would just end at stay at 100% if you kept playing it for long enough not very immersive however with some help from my friend n Cass we came up with a workaround in 2.2 percentage is no longer based on how long the level is but rather how long it took to complete it on the most recent verification so for example if i h a speed portal somewhere and beat the level with that and go back into it on another attempt without hitting it the percent will end super early while the level is still going this is overall a pretty buggy way to handle things in testing but once the level is finished it generally works pretty well generally remember that I said it only counts the completion time of your most recent verification so if we found a way to verify insanely quickly and then have it go back to normal the percent should lock to 100 at the very start after some trial and error with different ideas Cass came up with this setup end triggers have a feature where on ending you can spawn a group so using the end trigger at the final cut scene we use it to spawn a pickup trigger that adds one to this item value here for every time you beat the level then we create an instant count trigger to check when this value hits three so when we beat the level three times in a row it then spawns another end trigger in 01 seconds instantly completing it this way the game sees our most recent completion being 01 seconds and so the percentage in the level reflects that it might have absolutely ruined the comment section for this level but it was worth it for that sweet sweet immersion of course that also means that this level gives you a ton of Mana orbs for free but I don't think it really matters with a non- demon difficulty level there's also one other weird Quirk with this level in the editor it says the level is 15 minutes long but beyond the actual ending at roughly a minute and 20 seconds there are no far out blocks to be seen as it turns out teleport triggers really mess with the length of a level when testing the level's length originally said somewhere around 30 minutes long but the sheer number of unnecessary teleport triggers made the game lag quite a lot so I reduced it to only the necessary ones which still made the level display as 15 minutes long if I wanted to I could spam the level with teleport triggers and obliterate its in-game length just to mess with people who copy the level and act cool in the comments telling me that it's not really infinite it's only 15 minutes long incredible but with that this technical Behemoth of a project was finally done and ready to be released while it's definitely not the level for everyone I am very glad that some people can appreciate it for its atmosphere unique theming and the puzzle for completing it but I also know that most people don't care to solve a puzzle for a six-star and that's completely fine this is definitely a level made for a unique experience and I accept that that experience isn't for everyone but regardless I want to say thank you to everyone for the reception on this level to robtop for giving it epic which is crazy and a comet face ARB and ncas especially with their invaluable assistance with it throughout his creation this level would not be the same without their help so genuinely a huge thank you goes out to them with that being said here's a Showcase of the full level without a secret way [Music] [Music] he [Applause] [Music] if you're interested I highly encourage you to go check the level out in game and try to solve it for yourself even if you've watched the whole process in this video I guarantee you'll still have a fun time getting to complete it on your own but with that being said that concludes the process of the most technically advanced level I hope I will ever make I hope you enjoyed And subscribe if you enjoyed this video because I definitely didn't drain my life force going this in depth on this level with that being said [Music] he [Music]

Channel: AudieoVisual

Views: 26,313

Keywords: Geometry Dash, geometry dash 2.2, geometry dash creating, geometry dash tutorial, audiovisual, audieovisual, geometry dash audiovisual, audiovisual gd, infinite level geometry dash, in fi ni ty, geometry dash infinity

Id: rIRjzOVjGyw

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 14 2024