Until this week Powderline had two ways to play. Free ride drops you on the endless mountain and counts how far you get. A 1v1 race puts you and a friend on the same stretch of it. Both are fun for an evening, and neither tells you what to do next. So the game now has a campaign: forty levels in five chapters, each with a goal, a clock or a score, and medals to earn. This post is about what is in it, how a level is made out of a mountain that never ends, and how we made sure every one of them can be ridden. The short version is in the changelog.
Five chapters
The campaign starts at the resort: a groomed piste, a snow park and a lot of people watching. The second chapter goes into the backcountry, with deep woods, powder, sun crust and patrol sleds. The third is big mountain: open bowls, sheet ice and the first avalanche. The fourth is the storm, with night laps under floodlights, a whiteout where you can see twenty metres, and wind. The last is the north face at first light, where all of it comes at once.
Every chapter ends with a boss. Three of them are duels against a rival's recorded run: you race their ghost down the same course and see where you stand at every metre. The others end in an avalanche you have to outrun to the safe zone. Chapters open with stars, so you can move on without a perfect run on every level, and finishing every level of a chapter opens its hard mode: one life, where a crash or a missed door ends the run.
Twelve kinds of level
A level is always about one thing. In a race you get down to the finish gate fast. A slalom has red and blue doors, and every one you miss costs three seconds. In a letters level six balloons spelling POWDER are tied off along the run, some far off the line and some high above a kicker, and you collect them by riding straight through. A score attack gives you a minute or two in the park to pile up points; some of them only keep your combo alive for a couple of seconds between tricks, and some turn the trick boost off. A trick list asks for specific tricks: a backflip, a 720, a cork, three perfect landings in a row.
Big air puts three competition kickers on the run, each with a target sprayed on its landing, and pays for the trick and for the ring you land in. A photo shoot hides photographers beside the kickers: fly through their frame with a trick and land it clean, and the strobe tells you that you are in. On the north face only doubles make the magazine. In a duel you race a ghost. In an avalanche level the slope breaks above you and the slide chases you down the hill.
The rest are about the mountain fighting back. Rope lines close everything outside a corridor, and crossing one ends the run. Patrol snowmobiles cross the run on their own schedule, and you hear their engines before you see them. Winch cats work the steeps with their steel cable stretched across the run at knee height, so you have to jump it or go round it. Patches of sun crust grab the board and patches of slush drag it, and you can see both coming. The storm levels add a whiteout, darkness between the floodlights, and a crosswind that pushes you off your line in the air.
A level is a stretch of the mountain
Powderline's mountain is not stored anywhere; it is worked out from arithmetic as you ride, the same on every machine. That is what made the race courses possible, and the campaign is built the same way. A level is a starting point on the mountain, somewhere in its first 30 km, plus a description: how long it is, how hard the snow already is at the start, which regions it runs through, what time of day it is, and what stands on it.
The game turns that description into a course when you start. Slalom doors go down the line at their spacing, swinging either side. Balloons hang where the level says, or at the top of a kicker's flight path, worked out from the speed a rider leaves its lip. A winch cat parks to one side of the run, its anchor goes uphill on the other, and the sag of its cable is solved so it crosses the line at knee height. Everything the level puts down gets a clearing, so no tree grows through a balloon and no kicker lands in a slalom lane. Every timed level also gets a groomed trail a few metres wide along its line, so there is always a way down at speed. Through the woods it reads as a cut between the trunks.
Nothing in a level is a stand-in. The doors are real race panels on breakaway poles. The checkpoints are inflatable arches with a blower humming at one foot. The landing targets are sprayed into the snow, and the boundary is bamboo poles, rope and flagging tape. The patrol sled has a rider at the bars, and the winch cat has an operator in the cab and leaves fresh corduroy behind its tiller. The photographers kneel with a long lens beside their softbox. The floodlights throw pools of light onto the snow, and the avalanche is a billowing cloud of powder over a flow of tumbling blocks, with the broken crown still visible above it.
A rider that rode every level
A level that cannot be finished is worse than no level, and on a mountain made by arithmetic you only find out by riding it. So we built a rider that does nothing else. It runs the game's real physics and the level's real rules, without the graphics, and rides every level the way a careful racer would. It plans the arcs a carve can actually hold at its speed, reads ice and cross-slope ahead, checks its speed through the doors, waits for a sled to pass and jumps the cables.
It found things a person would have taken weeks to find. On one course an ice traverse with a strong cross-slope pulled every rider off the line, so that level moved to another stretch of the mountain, and so did a dozen others. A chapter-one slalom sat on a patch of ice, so it moved to a stretch with almost none, while Ice Gates got the iciest one we could find. The big air targets were first placed for a speed nobody reaches off those lips, so they are now placed for the speed riders really leave the kicker at, on ground that falls straight down the fall line. Otherwise a kicker throws you off sideways.
The same rider sets the medals. Its clean time on each timed level is the par: gold sits just over it, and the Powderline medal just under it, which takes the trick boosts and a braver line than the bot rides. Each avalanche's speed is fitted to the bot's slowest clean line, leaving it 35 metres at the closest. Riding well keeps you ahead, and stopping to look back does not. The rivals' ghosts in the duels are its fastest runs.
Stars and coins
A level gives up to three stars: bronze, silver and gold. Your progress is kept in your browser, so the campaign works without an account and on the portals. With an account it follows you to every device, and every new star pays coins, more the deeper the chapter. Each star pays once, ever. The campaign is open now from the main menu.
