MarbleMagnificence

What you actually roll down

The courses

Four exist, and all four are the release set. None is finished, so what is below is the state of things, not a trailer.

Each clip is ten seconds of a release build on an iPhone 16 Pro simulator. No cuts, no speed-up, no music. The marble is driving itself, which is why it is being driven badly.

  1. Course 1

    The Mountain

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

    Five terraces — flat octagonal rings, each lower and wider than the one above — joined by a handful of ramps. A smooth cone would be one long accelerating slide with no decisions in it. Terraces break the descent into legs: you land 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.

    It opens broad and generous, then climbs onto an exposed switchback shelf where 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.

    Every hall runs the complete spectrum and drops seven storeys on the way, with broad turn courts joining the alternating northbound and southbound runs.

    • 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 which way it faces.

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

    • 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, which 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.