Geometry Dash World Retrospective

Happy Winter Solstice everybody!

This day exactly 9 years ago, on December 21, 2016, was one of the most memorable days of my life, which feels sort of weird, but it's because a lot happened during it that I'm still happy about. It was one of my childhood friends' birthday, I hung out with him and some other friends as well for a while, and I remember my sister got a copy of Pokémon Sun.

Aside from that, though, this was when I was really into Geometry Dash, and it was already a good day for me as it was when I first beat Theory of Everything II, my first official demon level and fourth overall.

If you were around the game's community back then, though, you might know why this day was so notable for everybody, not just me. On that day Geometry Dash World was announced and later released.

This was not the first Geometry Dash spin-off, as Geometry Dash Meltdown (which I also wrote about) came out the year before, but that was announced with a few days of warning.

The trailer for the game came out at 7:46 AM AST, and I downloaded the game at around 8:01 PM according to an old screenshot. I could not stop thinking about this for the rest of the day.

I was absolutely hyped for this game. At the time we were still waiting for Update 2.1, which at this point has taken over a year. This was our first proper look into the new update, as GD World came out before the update, unlike Meltdown which came out after 2.0.

The video teased some of the new features of the update. These include the shops with new icons, mana orbs to buy things from the shop, a secret shop, and the level featured even showed off a new backgrounds and coloured, which I remember being super excited about specifically.

All of this came with the new game! Along with the introduction of diamonds which you could get from quests and other stuff, demon keys which you can get for getting 500 mana orbs, and a secret Treasure Room you'd unlock once you got five of those, filled with chests to open with them. Inside that room was also Scratch's "secret" shop.

Additionally, the game also introduced Daily levels, with one new level every single day, usually of medium to harder difficulty, which is a very nice range! And I remember being super into these for months.

Additionally, one of the best things of this game was that things were actually much deeper than they seemed. The new Vault of Secrets, which at first seemed like another place to just type in codes for icons, was actually much deeper than it appeared.

One of the codes, Cod3breaker, which was discovered from an ARG, actually required a very cryptic code to solve, which took quite a while to be deciphered. Another code, which gave you a coin, required an exchange between this vault and the original one from Update 2.0.

And lastly, of course, there's The Challenge! An additional short level that would be unlocked if you got 200 diamonds. This level was the very first showcase of the brand new Spider gamemode which was the main new gameplay feature of 2.1.

Also, once you'd beat it, a door to a dungeon would unlock. Here you would get an icon, but also a mysterious creature would be revealed imprisoned in the dungeon, and you'd need three keys to unlock it, though only the green one was available in GD World.

All of this is not even bringing up the actual new levels from the game, which I don't want to go into a whole lot of detail this time, as I feel like they deserve an entire entry all for themselves.

Instead of GD Meltdown, which featured three standard-length levels, GD World featured ten pretty short levels, all of around 30 seconds in length. These were also spread in two linear worlds, The Dashlands and the Toxic Factory, each with five levels that would only unlock after beating the previous ones.

None of the levels really showed off the new gameplay features, however they did contain some new elements from the 2.1 editor! Specifically new backgrounds and new bits of decoration, that seemed very cool.

Again, I want to go into more detail about these some other time, however they were perfect additions to the game, and in my opinion are some of — if not the best levels in terms of design in the whole series.

GD World remains to this day my absolute favourite Geometry Dash spin-off. Although it might not be the most impressive nowadays, as 2.1 has been out for so long now, this was pretty much the most perfect sneak peek ever for it.

It showed a lot of stuff that was announced and gave enough to play with, while not showing off everything and still keeping us looking forward to the full update.

Additionally, I remember it taking almost a whole week for everything to actually be revealed, as the amount of diamonds you could get per day was limited. Because of this, it actually took some time to be able to access certain things, such as Scratch's Shop and The Challenge.

This was seriously such a fantastic game, both in general and as a GD spin-off specifically. Even if not as interesting now, I still really appreciate every single thing it did super well, and I fondly remember being part of the community as we slowly uncovered everything, as we all waited for the big update it gave us a peek into. :)

Also Happy (Belated) Birthday Andy!!!