Before You Read

Before explaining how the guides are organized, it's crucial for you to know how to use them. To put it simply: Read the guides carefully, and practice.

Many people try to rush through guides, wanting a quick fix for a Super Important and Critical Creating Problem. Others read all the guides, but don't do any practice.

Doing either of these hurts your ability to improve. If you just skim read the guides, you'll miss crucial info about creating. Not only does each sentence exist for a reason, but you're more likely to retain information if you actually focus on reading.

Speaking of retaining info, improving in Geometry Dash isn't something you can do just by reading a book. The best way to internalize the guides is by testing the features they show on your own, and practicing their content in some way. We have exercises in our Discord server to help with this as well.

Unfortunately, many people struggle with mindset issues which prevent them from reading the guides carefully or practicing. The sections below detail some common issues we notice in the community.

Most people quickly come to learn that creating is a large time investment. There's such a large time requirement that it's easy to lose sight of your end goal. However, talking about your lack of free time or motivation won't do much to remedy those problems.

If you're really invested in becoming a good creator, spend some time to make time. Set aside some dedicated time each day, such as 30 minutes or an hour, where you can practice building and gain experience. And to motivate yourself, try setting concrete goals for yourself. The more time you can spend doing creating, the faster you'll get results, and the best time to start is now.

While it's easy to say that improvement takes work, actually understanding that fact is much harder. Many people know they must be persistent, but still feel like giving up when they don't make something that looks good to them. Oftentimes, you'll hear statements like these:

• "This just doesn't look good, and I don't know why"

• "Everything I make looks so bad and random."

The first way to fix this is by gaining community. Find other people of any skill level and talk about creating with them. Share ways you've learned to improve, and ask them for their advice as well. Just like when playing a game, you won't know all the best strategies when you first start; if you want a good judgement of your skill, you should go to people who have experience with it.

Admittedly, it's embarassing to message a skilled creator, send them something that looks atrocious, and ask "How can I improve?". However, it's a crucial step towards getting help. Nobody can help if you delete everything that you think looks bad, never show anything you make, or just stay in your head all day.  Remember: everyone else has been in this position too. If they aren't complete jerks, they'll try to help you as well.

When you do get help, it may be very demotivating. You may create something that you're actually proud of for once, share it with the world, and be assaulted with scathing critiques. And if you only focus on improvement, getting beat down like this can seriously affect your mindset. Like in school, you may tie your self-worth as a creator to the amount of praise or criticism your levels get, which can make the prior issues far worse than they'd be otherwise.

If you're ever stressed out about improvement or making good levels, consider following the 50% Rule for a while:

The point of this rule is to try and prioritize your mental health, first and foremost. While you may want to become a skilled, famous creator all the time, you can't sacrifice fun or a good mental state for that goal - it's just not worth it.

After all, Geometry Dash is just a game at the end of the day. It's not life or death, a job you get paid for, or a task you complete with a gun to your head. If you need to prioritize your mental health, education, or having fun above becoming a good creator, don't hesitate to do so. This game will still be here once you return.

With the mindset info out of the way, it's time to discuss how guides work. This section broadly discusses how guides are organized, how to practice what they say, and some other info that's good to know.

This website's Guides are organized into Courses, Units, and individual Guides.

Guides are the individual units of information. Each one covers an important skill; for example, Using Deco Objects teaches how to use objects for deco. Guides are not style-dependent; you will not find "glow style" or "modern style" guides, but fundamental skills you can apply to anything you want to make.

Units contain related skills inside a course. For example, when reading ⁠Triggers 1 you'll find a unit on basic triggers, then ones on transformations, audio triggers, and so on.

Courses organize each grade's guides by topics. Each course has a dedicated page, like The GD Editor and Main Skills found in the Grade 0 guides. After Grade 1, each course has a number corresponding to its grade level, like ⁠Gameplay 1.

Here are all the grades and their respective meanings:

• Grade 0 - No prior experience with the GD Editor. You should start with the Beginner Guides.

• Grade 1 - You know some stuff about the GD Editor, and are on the path to learning how to make things like gameplay and deco. You should read the Intermediate Guides.

• Grade 2 - You know the fundamentals of making gameplay, using triggers, or decorating. This grade focuses on additional skills and concepts you should know going forward. You should read the Advanced Guides.

• Grade 3 - You've learned advanced skills and are ready to tackle advanced theories behind creating. You should read the Expert Guides.

Exercises are short tasks to practice skills from the guides. These are accessible through our Discord Server if you get the Guided Access role. You're also able to get Grade roles by joining, but this requires you to complete the guides in order (so no skipping straight to the advanced guides!).