MarbleMagnificence

What you actually roll down

The courses

Four exist, and all four are the release set. None of them is finished — two are still missing an ending — so what is below is the state of things, not a trailer.

Each clip is ten seconds off an actual phone. No cuts, no speed-up, no music. The marble is being driven badly on purpose.

  1. Course 1

    The Mountain

    A stepped mountain. You start on a broad flat summit and work down.

    Most complete. Terraces, alternate routes, a tunnel ride and a finish flag.

    Five terraces — flat octagonal rings, each lower and wider than the one above — joined by a handful of ramps. That structure is the point: a smooth cone is one long accelerating slide with no decisions in it, and boring after four seconds. Terraces break the descent into legs. You arrive on a flat still carrying your speed, and now you have to spend it.

    • Consecutive descents never share a heading, so landing on a terrace means crossing it before you can drop again.
    • Chutes run the octagon’s chamfers at 35.3° against the ramps’ 45°. Take them in order and there is a spiral from the sea to the summit.

  2. Course 2

    The Long Thaw

    An ice crossing that starts forgiving and stops being forgiving.

    Exploratory, with the finish now inside the ice palace.

    It opens broad and generous, then climbs onto an exposed switchback shelf where carrying too much speed means leaving the mountain altogether. The grippy turn bays are the punctuation: arrive under control, turn deliberately, commit to the next icy leg.

    • Grip is the scarce resource here, not space.
    • The turn bays are the only places you get to change your mind.

  3. Course 3

    Prism Hall

    Four rainbow halls arranged as a descending serpent.

    The route skeleton is built. The exploration around it, and a real finish, are not.

    Every hall runs the complete spectrum and drops seven storeys on the way. Broad turn courts join alternating northbound and southbound runs, which keeps the route continuous while leaving room around it for the larger level this is going to become.

    • Four runs, each a full pass through the spectrum, seven storeys down.
    • The colour is the map: where you are in the spectrum is where you are in the hall.

  4. Course 4

    Escher Loop

    A closed loop you can roll around forever, because the floor keeps changing its mind about which way it faces.

    Picked as the fourth course. Its ending and checkpoints are still to be authored.

    A square tube lying on its side, a concave quarter-pipe joining each of its four inner surfaces, and a gravity zone over each one that tips the world 90° as you cross it. Go all the way round and you have been the right way up, on a wall, upside down, on the other wall, and back — with the camera’s isometric pitch never moving once, because it is the level that turns, not the view.

    • The odd colouring is not a bug: surfaces are shaded by which way they face, baked once when the level is built. A ceiling stays ceiling-coloured after it becomes your floor — strange for two seconds, then the most useful thing on screen, because it shows you the next floor before you are standing on it.

Every description above is the design note from the top of that level’s source file, rewritten only enough to read out loud.