ZOINK NEVER CLEAR - Full Showcase & $100 Bounty 💰

ID: 135360958

- Bounty Rules:

The first person/duo to beat this level legit without the use of bugs/exploits will receive the prize. You'll need to provide video proof of your completion that follows the same rules as if you were submitting a record on the Pointercrate Demonlist. You must share raw footage that showcases yourself completing an uncut run with isolated and audible clicks on their own audio track. For solo completions it will also be necessary to have a handcam showing both inputs to be present throughout the record attempt. For anything you can reach out on Discord (@smarted)

- Description:

Zoink Never Clear is a remake of a level I built more than 10 years ago called “Scorched Earth,” a project I never finished cause I knew I wouldn’t have been able to verify and upload it. Now it’s here.

Thanks to Lia and Gecko for organizing the 2P Creator Contest. I knew I wouldn’t have been able to submit this due to its extreme difficulty, but still it was the contest that inspired me to get to work on the level.
When the idea first came to mind, there were no upcoming 2-player levels aiming to be harder than Codependence, at least none that I knew of, so I wanted to give the 2P community something that could push the skill ceiling further, since every 2-player level had been beaten solo at that point. I started working on this project thinking it could serve as an end goal for dedicated players in the 2P community, which btw is easily one of the most welcoming and passionate subcommunities in GD I’ve been part of.

As I'm releasing this there have been many new potential hardest 2P levels coming out. It seems the wider community is starting to recognize the potential this gamemode has when it comes to difficulty, and that makes me happy! I’d love to see 2p levels become more mainstream. That said, I don’t want the 2p space to become cluttered with too many top demons all aiming for the number 1 spot, so if my only goal had been to make a really hard 2P level, I probably would have dropped the project a while ago.

Zoink Never Clear is more than that for me. This level could be seen as the culmination of my time as a level creator, an encapsulation of everything I loved about this game. ZNC is a celebration of what Geometry Dash meant to me when I was younger; it’s the kind of level I think my past self would have been excited to see.
It’s everything I wanted a hard level to be. If this level were a person, it would be an insufferable bully: it mocks you, screams at you, doesn't play nice, and is a sore loser. I wanted it to feel like an evolution of the impossible levels that inspired me growing up, something that looks hacked, with the kind of gameplay a hacker might have made in 2014. I know that because I wanted to be that hacker and I just didn’t know how.

The gameplay was originally created over 10 years ago with the goal of making the hardest thing I could imagine. While I had to change several parts to make them possible at all, I think it still stays true to its origins.
The reason it’s a 2 player level is actually pretty funny. Today I’m a big fan of 2p levels, but back then I didn’t feel strongly about the gamemode. I was just a kid playing on mobile, and since I didn’t know how to cheat, I couldn’t just hack upload my impossible level. My solution was to make it 2p so a friend could help verify it. As you can imagine, that didn’t work out. Still, it’s funny how years later I ended up doing something similar for another level and eventually became a fan of the gamemode.

While remaking the level, I decided to use modern editor features to expand on my original ideas, but I limited myself mostly to 1.9 objects so the remake wouldn’t drift too far from the original. I also kept scaling and movement triggers to a minimum for the same reason.

The level uses dark, muddy colors to create vast, desolate environments, shifting between empty landscapes, dark skies, and industrial settings. The idea was to show a dead Earth slowly adapting to the smog polluting the air and merging with the industrial structures built on top of it. The only things left roaming the planet are spirits and similar entities, mocking the last living thing trying to survive. The original name, Scorched Earth, would have made the theme more obvious, but back in 2015 working within the limits of the 1.9 editor and a low object count made it nearly impossible to convey those ideas properly (if you were bad like me). The old version was basically just a layout with minimal decoration, though in some areas I built on top of the original structures and expanded on the ideas I remember having as a kid.

I could keep blabbing about this level and the levels/other works of art that inspired its decorations, but I think I’m starting to sound a bit too pretentious so I better stop here.

Here’s another impossible level. Have fun playing it… or not! I definitely had fun making it :)

#geometrydash #gd #impossiblelevel #zoink