What a troll level is
Die Again is a troll platformer in the style of Level Devil. Each level is a single screen with two colours, a tiny stick figure and a grey door. You walk to the door. Somewhere on the way, the level lies to you. A floor opens, a block drops from the ceiling, or the door gets up and moves.
Troll levels are built on surprise, and surprise is easy to get wrong. A trap that kills you with no warning and no lesson just feels cheap. A trap that you understand the moment it fires, and can beat on the next try, feels like a joke you are in on. Most of our design work goes into staying on the right side of that line.
The game has 75 hand-made levels across five worlds. Early levels lie to you once. Later ones lie up to three times. Here is how we think about them.
Learnable lies
Our first rule is that every troll is deterministic. The same action at the same spot always triggers the same trap. When you die, the level resets to exactly the same state, so your first death is information. The second attempt should be winnable.
This is why there are no lives and no waiting. Death is instant and free, and you are back at the start in a fraction of a second. The whole loop is meant to be fast: a level should take roughly five to fifteen seconds once you know the trick, and the next level loads almost immediately.
Readability matters just as much. Solid ground is the dark colour and open space is the light colour, and there is nothing else to parse. The palette changes with every world, from the orange and yellow of Sand to the reds of Hell, but the rule stays the same, so the player always knows what is floor and what is not.
A trap punishes an action, not a position
Our second rule is that a trap responds to something you did. You jumped. You stood still too long. You went back. You were greedy for a coin. Traps that fire for simply being in a place are less interesting, because there is no choice involved.
The very first level shows the idea. It is a flat room with the door on the right. Walk toward it, and just before you arrive, the floor in front of the door falls away. The fix is simple once you know it, and the lesson sticks: in this game the floor is not to be trusted.
Signs get the same treatment. In one early level a sign reads jump!, and it sits right under a row of spikes hanging from the ceiling. Do what it says and you hit them. It is a small joke, and it teaches the player to read the room, not the text.
Every trap is a trigger and an effect
Under the hood, each troll is written as data: when something happens, do something. Triggers include reaching a column, standing in an area, getting near the door, landing, jumping, waiting, touching the door, picking up a coin, and even how many times you have died on the level. Effects include opening a pit, raising a wall, adding or removing spikes, dropping a block, flipping gravity, reversing the controls, swapping colours, turning the lights down, and moving, hiding or faking the door.
Writing traps this way keeps levels quick to build and easy to adjust. If a trap fires a little too early, we move one number. It also makes combinations natural. In one level the door flies to the other side of the room when you get close, then flies back the moment you turn around to follow it.
The door is our favourite tool. It can slide, hop, fly or teleport, and the game checks for touching the door before checking for a win, which means a door can turn out to be fake. Doors that run away became a running theme, and each one leaves behind a short caption like bye or nope.
Teach it first, then break it
Each world adds new ideas. Sand covers the basics of distrust: pits, falling blocks, moving doors, invisible blocks, gravity and reversed controls. Rust is built from counter-traps. Ocean goes vertical. Tomb brings coins as bait, springs that sometimes do not work, saws, darkness and screen wrap. Hell remixes everything.
The first level of each world teaches its new mechanic before the world starts to twist it. Rust opens with a good example. After a world where the floor kept opening in front of the door, you expect another pit. There is a question mark on the wall. The pit never comes. Jump near it and a block falls from above instead. The trap only works because the previous world taught you something.
We also keep a few authoring rules so traps stay fair. Pits always reach the bottom of the screen, so a fall is clearly fatal. Crumbling platforms always sit over pits, so they can never trap you in a spot with no way out. Every level has at least one troll, so no room is ever truly safe.
Proving every level can be beaten
A troll game asks players to trust that there is a way through. We take that seriously. A test solver searches for a sequence of inputs that beats each level and saves the winning plan. Every build replays those plans, and a level that cannot be beaten blocks the release. It has already caught real dead ends, including a tower ceiling that made one level impossible.
For players who get properly stuck, a free skip appears after five deaths on the same level. There are no ads in Die Again, and the only controls are left, right and jump.
Die Again is in development and coming to Android first. If you enjoy careful puzzle design with a calmer pace, Arrow Flow is out now. We will share more about Die Again as it gets closer to release.