How A Neon White Level Is Made

Introduction

As of writing, the fastest runthrough of Neon White’s “Smackdown” level is 9.56 seconds, earned by player “earlobe” on September 6, 2022.

Its work is strikingly different. Ben Esposito (designer and creative director) said that the first iteration of the product was released in March 2019. This is more than three years prior to its June 2022 release. There were over 50 iterations at that point. Sometimes the changes were very small. Some changes were small. Others had an impact on the entire level. Smackdown was touched on by all the designers who have worked on it. You can still load it up now, as most of the labor involved is already visible to you. It took me just eleven seconds to beat before I could sit down and write.

Neon White is all about speedrunning. The levels are very short. If you’re playing as intended, you hardly notice your surroundings before moving on. However, levels must be carefully designed in a way that allows for that natural movement. A lot of work goes into making a level one doesn’t think twice about.

The majority of the time, it works. We gave Neon White a 9.5, and our review mentioned the level and game design, saying it feels “effortless as if you’ve practiced for years, not just 15 to 20 minutes.”

We spoke to Russell Honor (game/level programmer), Esposito (game/level designer) and Carter Piccollo (senior level environment designer and artist), to learn how this effortlessness was possible. They also walked us through Smackdown’s creation from conception to completion.

March 2019,

March 2019,

Neon White is all about speedrunning. But it wasn’t always the case that every level emphasized that point.

Esposito says that many levels had been built before Smackdown around teaching certain mechanics. The team was able to play through each level multiple times and optimize time. They also discovered shortcuts and other routes. Although Neon White still helps you with the mechanics of the game, Smackdown forced the team to look at it as a whole.

“This was specifically about exploring, ‘What if we didn’t teach you something new? What if it was about revisiting it over and over again,’” Esposito says. “And the things we ended up learning in levels like this created new ways of thinking about the rest of the game.”

The earliest version of the code is pulled up by him, which runs in Unity. It’s a graybox, featuring the level geometry but without any art (see picture). While a few core ideas are the same as the shipped version – some enemy placements and level layout – there is one immediate flaw: ambiguity. It’s not always clear what you need to do.

The level starts with a Godspeed cards and an enemy to the left. It’s telling the player to grab the card, which grants a dash forward, before killing the enemy, which then drops an Elevate card, giving a double jump. But as Piccollo points out, there’s nothing on which to use that Elevate card. Neon white, he asserts, is all about using the things you already have.

To cut ambiguity, they’ll need to remove the Elevate card, telling the player instead they need to jump to the left (not double jump, mind you) and then dash forward through the next set of enemies. This dash has its problems. You will find two enemies on either side of the small gap. Once you get to them you’ll have two Godspeed cards. The enemies are placed so the player has to dash through both, but it’s unclear if they must dash twice to kill them or if one will do the trick.

This problem is fundamental.

“If you’re ever confused on what to do, the game doesn’t feel good and it starts to fall apart,” Piccollo says. “Your first time through needs to feel really clear. And the time where you’re fully optimized also needs to feel really good, otherwise it feels like you’re doing it wrong, even if it’s faster.”

Esposito said that building levels is all about eliminating ambiguity. Players feel more confident when there is little to no ambiguity. This is where having fun can be more important than being confident.

Both Honor and Esposito point to cards placed in the early versions. It’s a Bomb card only used for shortcuts. Which in that specific context works, but ideally, the player won’t know or see the shortcut on their first runthrough. The card becomes useless during the next level. That undercuts the player’s confidence.

“People would pick up the card and not understand what they were expected to do with it [and think they] missed something,” Esposito says. “That was another rule that we had to establish; every card has to have an obvious purpose in the moment that you pick it up.”

Mai 2020

May 2020

The time jumps forward by 14 months. We will see the later version in May 2020. The most noticeable change is all the art; it’s beginning to look like Neon White.

There’s now a straight runway at the beginning, funneling the player into the level. It features both a Godspeed and an Elevate card, though it’s laid out in such a way that you can’t see the latter behind the former. It’s a problem that’s addressed in later versions.

Issues from the first iteration also show up here — the dash is still unclear, it’s not immediately apparent what cards you should use, and as Esposito says, “there’s a lot going on.”

However, the Smackdown’s first half is beginning to come together. The back half is a different story; it’s completely different from the shipped version. Esposito points out a “failed” experiment where an enemy stands behind metal bars. The idea is players can shoot through these bars to kill an enemy, but can’t go through themselves. The setup still shows up in different forms throughout the game, but in this case, it’s cut. “Just because it was a confusing concept to people,” Esposito says. “It felt so important but it was actually completely unimportant to the concept of the level that it was distracting everyone.”

There’s no average number of changes or tweaks between iterations; it ranges from small nudges to complete remakes. That said, quick math reveals the scale of Neon White’s development. If we consider that it shipped with over 100 levels, the team made “double” that amount in scrapped levels, and Smackdown alone had more than 50 changes made to it, we’re faced with thousands of tweaks and redesigns throughout the entire game. Neon White was designed to be as quick as possible. However, it took a lot of work to get there.

Also, new ideas were added by the team to the game later on in the development process. Smackdown was one of these levels. The prototype stage served as an example of what a Neon White stage should look like and how it could be made successful. It had a profound impact on the remainder of the game, and necessitated new lessons that were to be applied throughout Neon White.

We leap ahead to January 20,21. We are able to see both the beginning and ending cards. No longer is the card dropped by an earlier enemy. The dash still needs work, but it’s getting closer. In the middle, there’s an enemy at the top of the staircase, but you might miss that fact at first glance. Although it is closer to the final version than in its original form, perhaps in a more shippable condition, it’s still quite clunky.

Eight months later, the first two cards are now more separated to provide the player with greater reaction time. To make it obvious, the gap is longer. You will need to use two dashes in order to defeat both your enemies. You can now see the location of the enemy on top of the stairs. Smackdown gives players more information to make it easy for them to use the game’s navigation tools. It’s becoming unambiguous. Although the ending seems to be in place, the route to the optional gift remains unclear. It’s reachable by jumping atop the columns surrounding the back of the level. But where the player needs to do that isn’t, as Esposito calls it, inviting. It looks like a place the player isn’t meant to reach.

Smackdown, however, is nearing completion. And in a few more months, it’ll be shippable.

March 20,22

March 20,22

Honor’s last change was on March 5, 2022. Esposito’s last bug fix was on March 27. He doesn’t specify, but Esposito says this final version is full of small tweaks. It’s all done and it looks just like any Smackdown video.

Most important is the present at the end. It’s now far clearer there’s a path around the back of the level leading to its hiding spot; it looks like part of the stage now, not a background element. As a last nudge, the two planks of wood are placed towards the gift.

Smackdown has been completed three years later.

It’s impossible to run down every tweak and change made throughout the level’s development. Sadly, there was a lot we had to leave out, and almost certainly dozens of things the team didn’t have time to go over with us. Nevertheless, an overview of three years of development distilled through the lens of one short level — even one completable in mere seconds — highlights the sheer scale of game development at all sizes. Neon White is a game made to be played quickly; it’s digestible in short chunks. The game’s creation was nothing short of amazing.

From entire redesigns to minor additions players won’t think twice about, it’s about the sum total of its parts than any one thing.

Unless you’re Honor, who boils Smackdown’s success down to one tiny decision.

“I think when those two planks got put down, that’s when it went from kind of a bad level to just about perfect,” he jokes.

Original publication of this article was Issue 350, Game Informer.