Durr Circles (Geometry Dash) - Tealy and the Crew

The level had been in development for four months before Beric told anyone about it.

This was classic Beric. He did not announce projects. He did not share works in progress. He did not seek input or feedback during the construction phase because the construction phase was a private technical matter between him and the work, and outside opinions introduced variables he hadn't accounted for. He had simply, quietly, over the course of four months, built something.

He showed Tealy first, which felt correct given the established hierarchy of who found out about things.

He handed over his 3DS, which was not what Tealy had expected, and said: "Look at this."

Tealy looked at it.

It was a Geometry Dash level in the preview screen. He scrolled through it slowly.

It was beautiful, first of all. The decoration was the kind of decoration that communicated immediately that a significant amount of care had been applied to every inch of it. The Nine Circles wave aesthetic was there but built on, layered, given a visual identity that was distinct and coherent and looked like something Beric had thought about for a long time, which he had, which was four months.

Then Tealy looked at the object count.

Then he looked at the gameplay sections.

"Beric," he said.

"Yeah."

"How many frame perfects."

"243."

Tealy looked up from the screen. "Tidal Wave has 200."

"I know."

"You made a level harder than Tidal Wave."

"Marginally."

"243 frame perfects is not marginally—"

"The wave sections are more forgiving than Tidal Wave's," Beric said, with the tone of someone who had done a comparative analysis. "The difficulty comes from the variety. Cube, ship, robot, spider, wave. You have to be good at everything."

Tealy scrolled to the swing section.

The swing section was on auto.

"Why is the swing on auto," Tealy said.

"Because I hate swing," said Beric simply.

Tealy looked at him.

"It's my level," Beric said.

This was unarguable.

"What's it called," Tealy said.

Beric had the expression of someone who had made one decision in the entire project that was not purely technical.

"Durr Circles," he said.

Tealy looked at the screen. At the level. At the 243 frame perfects and the auto swing section and the decoration that was quietly one of the best things he'd seen in the game.

"Who's verifying it," he said.

Beric looked at him with an expression that already knew Tealy knew the answer.

"No," said Tealy.

"He beat Tidal Wave," said Beric.

"As his THIRD LEVEL—"

"Which means he can beat this."

"Beric it will take him forever—"

"Probably," said Beric. "But he'll do it."

---

DumbDird's response to being asked to verify Durr Circles was immediate and physical. He made a sound that wasn't quite a word and grabbed the phone to look at the level preview and made the sound again, louder.

"DURR," he said, scrolling through it. "DURR BERIC."

"Yeah," said Beric.

"DURR IT'S BEAUTIFUL."

"Thanks."

"DURR IT HAS MY NAME."

"It has your catchphrase."

"DURR THAT'S MY NAME BERIC."

Beric considered this. "Fair."

"DURR I'LL DO IT," DumbDird said, with the same energy he'd said everything since he'd picked up the game, which was the energy of someone who did not have a fully developed relationship with the concept of consequences. "DURR WHEN DO I START."

"Whenever you want," said Beric.

DumbDird started that afternoon.

---

The first month was, by DumbDird's own reporting, a process of understanding.

"DURR TALLY THE ROBOT PART IS WEIRD" — Week 2, approximately 800 attempts in.

"DURR I THINK I GET THE SHIP NOW" — Week 3, which Beric noted was faster than he'd expected.

"DURR TALLY THE SPIDER MAKES ME FEEL LIKE A SPIDER" — Week 4, no further context provided, Dird reacted with 👍.

The attempts climbed. Beric tracked them with the quiet attention of someone monitoring a long experiment. The group chat received irregular updates. Blara posted cheese. The world continued.

By month three DumbDird had 12,000 attempts and had made it to 34%.

By month five he had 28,000 attempts and was consistently hitting 67%.

By month seven he had 38,000 attempts and had reached 89% twice, dying both times at a cube section that Beric reviewed on footage and described as "the cruelest sequence in the level" with what Tealy could only interpret as pride.

"DURR TALLY I'M CLOSE" — Month 7, attempt 38,241.

"DURR I CAN FEEL THE VIBES OF IT" — Month 8, which meant the same thing it had always meant and remained impossible to argue with given his track record.

"DURR TALLY THE WAVE AND I ARE ONE AGAIN" — Month 8, week 3, attempt 42,000 approximately, Tealy read this and felt something shift, because the last time DumbDird had said something like this he had beaten Tidal Wave fifteen minutes later.

---

The completion came at attempt 45,532.

Nine months after starting.

Tealy was present. Not because he'd planned to be, but because DumbDird had called him at 11 PM and said "DURR TALLY COME OVER" with a specific quality in his voice that was different from the normal specific quality and Tealy had driven over without asking why because some things you just know.

The whole group was there, it turned out. DumbDird had called everyone with the same energy and everyone had shown up with the same wordless understanding. Beric was in the corner with his 3DS, not playing it, just holding it, which for Beric was the equivalent of sitting on the edge of your seat. Dird was present in person, book closed, which had not happened for a non-drone-related event since the Netflix meeting. Blara had brought a cheese plate, which in retrospect felt ceremonial. Greeny was leaning against the wall with his arms folded looking like someone who had already run the probability calculations and found them favorable. The Groomba was there because Greeny had brought it and it was addressing a corner with focused energy.

UltraDumbDird had fallen asleep on the couch.

They watched the screen.

Attempt 45,532 began like all the others. The level opened. The music hit. DumbDird's cursor moved with the particular quality it had developed over nine months of this specific level, a fluency that was different from his natural wave instinct, something more built, more deliberate, nine months of accumulated knowledge expressing itself through his hands.

The cube section. Clean.

The ship. Clean.

The robot. Clean.

The spider. Clean.

The auto swing section passed without requiring anything of anyone, as Beric had intended, because Beric hated swing.

The wave.

The room got very quiet.

DumbDird was in the wave and the wave was what the wave always was for DumbDird, which was something his hands understood at a level that the rest of him didn't have to think about, nine months and 45,531 attempts of muscle memory and something else underneath that, something that had been there since Nine Circles, since the first time he'd said "the wave and I are one" and then proven it.

The frame perfects. One after another. 243 of them embedded in the level's DNA like landmines, the product of four months of Beric's technical imagination, and DumbDird hit them, not all of them cleanly, some of them by margins that made Beric's eye twitch watching the footage later, but he hit them.

The final wave section.

The end.

The screen turned gold.

DURR CIRCLES — COMPLETE

Attempts: 45,532

Time: 9 months

The room erupted in the specific way a room of these particular people erupted, which was DumbDird making a sustained sound that was technically the word DURR but had transcended its origins and become something more like a force of nature, Beric nodding slowly with the expression of a craftsman watching someone do justice to their work, Greeny producing a single controlled clap, Blara saying "okay that was actually sick" which was the most enthusiastic thing she'd said about anything in recent memory, Dird saying nothing but standing up, which from Dird was a standing ovation.

UltraDumbDird woke up, looked around, said "is there food," was told what had just happened, said "DURR!! GOOD JOB COUSIN!!" and fell back asleep.

The Groomba beeped. Nobody knew if it was celebratory. The corner was cleaner though.

---

Beric submitted it.

The list team reviewed it.

Durr Circles was placed at number one on the Demon List, the hardest rated level in Geometry Dash, above Tidal Wave, above everything.

The community reacted the way the community reacted to things, which was at volume and at length. The decoration was praised extensively. The 243 frame perfects were discussed, dissected, argued about. The auto swing section generated a particular thread that went on for some time, in which Beric participated exactly once to say "I hate swing" and then left.

The record stood for two weeks.

---

Zoink beat it on a Tuesday.

He streamed it. The completion run was calm in the way that Zoink's completions were always calm, the equanimity of someone very good at something doing the thing they were good at, and when the level ended he sat back and looked at the camera.

"Tidal Wave difficulty," he said. "Lowkey."

His chat said many things.

Zoink shrugged. "The decoration goes hard though. The auto swing is funny. Respect to Beric."

---

Durr Circles was moved to number three.

Beric received this information, looked at it for a moment, and said: "The decoration is still good."

This was true. The decoration was still good. Number three on the entire Demon List. Harder than essentially everything except the two levels now above it. A level that had taken its verifier nine months and 45,532 attempts, built by a man who had constructed it because he could and had put an auto swing section in it because he hated swing.

DumbDird's response to being moved to number three: "DURR TALLY WE'RE STILL TOP THREE"

Tealy: "Yeah."

DumbDird: "DURR BERIC'S LEVEL IS REALLY GOOD"

Tealy: "Yeah."

DumbDird: "DURR TALLY WHAT'S ABOVE US"

Tealy looked at the list.

Sent the names.

A pause.

"DURR SHOULD I—"

"No," Tealy typed, before the sentence was finished.

"DURR TALLY—"

"DumbDird you just spent nine months on one level—"

"DURR YEAH AND I'M WARMED UP NOW TALLY"

Tealy stared at warmed up.

Nine months. 45,532 attempts. Top three in the world. Warmed up.

He sent the message to the group chat with no context.

Dird reacted with 👍

Beric replied: "He has a point technically."

Tealy looked at Beric's message for a long time.

Then he put his phone down.

Then he got a Banana Nacho gummy.

Then he picked his phone back up and looked at the list again.

Then he put it back down.

Warmed up.

Nine months and the man felt warmed up.

Tealy went to bed.

DumbDird was almost certainly already looking at the number one level.

There was nothing to be done about this.

There had never been anything to be done about any of it.

That, at this point, was just life.