Understanding the sliding mechanic

The sliding mechanic in Marble Blast is fundamental to the game, but few really understand how it works.

First of all, how do you get the marble to slide? It's quite simple, let the marble land on a surface with an angle of 45 degrees or less while holding down a movement key. If you do not hold down a movement key, you peform a natural bounce, if your angle is greater than 45 degrees, you will do a normal bounce.

Note: A moving platform forces natural bounces so you can never truly do a slide on them.

The main unknown about sliding is the speed you gain from it. I should make it clear that when I talk about "sliding" I strictly mean the slide you get when you land, not any type of sliding over a surface (like sliding over ice or trying to slow down without jumping when going at great speeds). We all, however, have seen this in action already. The first example is the WR path on Free Fall, this has commonly been referred to as "the wall glitch" even though it is an intended mechanic of the game. The second example uses the very same mechanic, a small speed boost by sliding on the wall.

We normally don't pay much attention to this when playing, but it is a fundamental part of gaining speed on regular interiors (as opposed to pure aerial acceleration). Take a look at this run of a custom level I made. Look carefully at the speedometer at the bottom right corner; notice how every time the marble touches the floor, it gets a small bumb in its speed? This is the very same sliding mechanic used in the WRR examples above, just that in my video I keep jumping after every speed gain so it it's very hard to notice it unless you're looking for it.

And just to be very clear, yes, it is the landing that gives the speed bump in the direction you're going, not the jump. The way the speed gain truly works is that the speed you have at the moment of hitting the surface gets redirected in the direction of the surface, so it is the fall speed from the jump that gets added to your forward momentum. Look at the last run in my video and notice the time difference. The last run reaches the goal faster despite starting further back, this is because the tube allows for many more jumps to be done in the same time (you can make much more efficient tubes than I did, but it still gets the point across). Make sure to note that neither level is tilted in any way, both are perfectly flat. I point this out because the marble jump is simply a force perpendicular to the surface the marble is touching, so jumping alone shouldn't make the marble reach the goal faster since it doesn't get pushed in that direction. It is, as I pointed out, the sliding mechanic that causes the speed to be inconsistent between the tube and the flat surface.

If we watch the video from the start we see three different runs on a level that looks a lot like Free Fall, and it was indeed intended to help me test exactly how this mechanic works. The first run is a benchmark to show how long it takes to fall without any sliding. In the second run, I hold down W until I hit the blue wall, then let go of all buttons. As expected, we see a slightly better time with the wall slide. In the third run I start off in the same way, but I turn back after starting to slide on the blue wall and use a hole in it to go towards the rug-textured wall. This is to show that touching the wall multiple times in a single fall won't do any good; the time I get is effectively the same (it's slightly inconsistent due to fluctuating FPS). It also shows that once you've passed the point of sliding, the friction doesn't matter anymore, rug's friction is six times higher than normal yet it didn't slow me down at all.

Special thanks to HiGuy.