Fall Guys is looking to move into creative platformer territory this week with the release of Fall Guys Creative, a new mode to the game launching alongside Season Four on 10 May. The concept, clearly having other creative titles like Super Mario Maker in its sights, provides the bones for Fall Guys players to create and customise their own levels from scratch, using their own design ideals and principles – or, let’s be honest, just make the hardest possible level that’s allowable on the service.

Mediatonic, Fall Guys‘ developers, are fine with that though. Joe Walsh, Creative Director on Fall Guys, feels that Creative is necessary to give a new direction and stir novelty in the game. They expect and encourage people to make troll levels, or levels that aren’t built for 60 players, as their long term plan involves seeing what people make for themselves and what they expect Fall Guys to become. Mediatonic themselves have been using Creative mode, or a version of it, for the best part of a year to make levels, and will be launching 50 Mediatonic-made levels over the course of Season Four, with a few available from the start to show players what’s possible.

Trying out the Creative mode for myself, my first instinct was certainly to make as tough a level as I could – something I called ‘Deep Pain’. There’s a range of materials you can use to build your level from, including different kinds of surfaces, from soft, to hard, to slimy and even a moving conveyer-belt type. You can stretch out floors to be any size you like, while filling the surface with both simple obstacles and more complex ones, as Fall Guys Creative launches with a ‘best of’ collection selected by the team. This includes spinning discs, pendulums, and punching blocks. Boom Blasters are new obstacles included for Fall Out Creative, which send out rhythmic pulses. Levels and obstacles don’t have to be flat either, you’re able to rotate most objects in 3D space. For instance, I built a stretch of conveyer belt with a giant fan blowing down on it from an angle, making it impassable unless players take an alternate route to the side. There’s also two visual ‘themes’ you can build your level around right now, the standard Fall Guys aesthetic, and a new ‘vapourwave’ style Digital theme, with presumably more on the way in future seasons.

You do have a ‘budget’ for each level of 1000, which every object you place counts towards. Deep Pain only ended up costing about 400 out of the possible 1000, but one of the more complex levels Mediatonic showed off reached 897 out of 1000, which was an advanced-seaming vertical level with obstacles built on top of obstacles. Helpfully, you can drop a test jellybean guy anywhere you like on the map, letting you test out specific parts without having to replay the level in its entirety. However, if you’re going to publish the level, then you’ll need to do a test run-through from start to finish in under 4 minutes (although you’re allowed to die as many times as you need to get it right). Once published, you’ll get a share code you can write down or access from the level browser in-game to send to your friends and followers. The show selector from the main menu is getting a visual refresh and expansion as well, to allow Mediatonic to showcase the best creator levels as they come across them.

Right now, it’s much easier to use Fall Guy Creative‘s level builder with a controller than it is with a mouse and keyboard, and it seems to have been built around that control method. While it would seem that a mouse/keyboard combo would be the most intuitive, particularly for placing and dragging out objects, the way things are set up right now (your mouse rotating the camera rather than controlling a cursor, for instance) really show that controllers are where Fall Guys‘ focus is right now.