Today, I started building a level that was not a race.
The first three courses in North Is Not Up asked the player to find controls in order. Black Crag Rescue used the same map-and-compass foundation for a different problem: follow evidence across a mountain, find an injured walker and report the correct grid reference.
The change of objective made Level 4 feel like a separate kind of experience, but it also tested whether the systems underneath the game were genuinely reusable.
Reusing the navigation without reusing the race
Black Crag covers a 900 by 900-metre mapped area—nearly twice the area of Brackenford Crossing.
I reused the player controller, physical compass, map rotation, footsteps, settings and timer. The geography and mission logic were new. Instead of sequential control punches, the level needed a last-known position, clues, a casualty search, treatment, grid selection and a radio transmission.
The clue sequence built a route without drawing one. A discarded backpack and glove suggested where the walker had travelled. Search Notes retained useful observations, while a whistle came from the casualty's actual location as three short blasts with variable waits. The sound weakened with distance and became muffled by intervening terrain, so turning and listening became part of the search.
Finding the casualty was not the finish. The player had to stabilise them, select a 100-metre grid square and relay the location. That final step made accurate position-fixing part of the rescue rather than an optional bit of map reading.
Authoring the mountain as one source of truth
The level's terrain, paths, water, landmarks and collision were saved as authored resources rather than generated while the game ran. I derived the topographic map from the same elevation samples used for the 3D ground.
The world included exposed ridges, sheltered routes, bothies, stone walls, a tarn, a beck, a waterfall and a bridge. Fog increased after the backpack clue, changing the feel of the return without altering the map itself.
That landscape needed to support at least two sensible searches. One route crossed the exposed ridge; another followed more sheltered ground. The whistle and clue state had to work on both rather than assuming the player followed one scripted corridor.
Fixing the route at player scale
Several of the most important faults only appeared when I drove the actual character controller across the level.
The bridge approach contained a 26-centimetre lip that looked harmless but interrupted movement. I added physical ramps and checked the deck from both directions. Two downhill positions near the whistle area could trap the character against the ridge, so I introduced capsule-tested stepping with headroom and landing checks.
I also added a Safe Ground action for cases where the player still became stuck. It returned them to a recent verified footing without erasing mission progress or elapsed time.
The water needed an even broader audit. I rebuilt the beck with a collidable bed and banks, matched its shallow-water footprint to the visible surface and corrected the tarn and waterfall. The resulting grounding check sampled 5,394 water points so visible water could not float above empty space or disappear inside the terrain.
Buildings, walls and the casualty needed the same attention. I corrected the bothy foundations, replaced crude structures with better stone assets and ensured the injured walker remained visibly alive rather than resembling a defeated game character. Stabilisation added a breathing foil without resetting the casualty animation.
Giving the level its own atmosphere
The following day, I moved the environment into the same stylised visual language as the earlier courses. I rebuilt bothies, improved wildlife and completed the investigation clues.
I also used ElevenLabs text-to-speech to generate British narration for the tutorial and Black Crag's clue sequence. I wrote each line to support the existing text rather than race ahead of the player's actions, then tied the generated voiceover to a specific mission transition.
Mountain wind, meadow ambience, river sound and the casualty whistle all occupied different roles. The ambience established height and exposure; the directional whistle carried gameplay information. Keeping those roles separate stopped the landscape sound from masking the thing the player needed to hear.
Where Black Crag stands now
By the end of the second day, the core rescue, persistence and audio suites covered 113 checks. Two complete controller-driven routes reached the final transmission without disabling collision or teleporting between waypoints.
Those checks did not prove the target completion time for an unfamiliar human player, and they did not turn every part of the mountain into photorealistic scenery. They did prove that the rescue could be completed through the same physical navigation rules as the rest of the game.
Black Crag showed me that North Is Not Up did not need to be limited to races. The map and compass could support a slower investigation, directional audio and a story objective without giving the player a blue dot or a prescribed route.
