So games done 'quick is currently doing one of their marathon speedrunning extravaganzas for charity which is awesome, and we figured since they're awesome
We should point you in their direction and use this occasion as an opportunity to talk about speedrunning in an episode
So let's do that and once we're done here
Go watch some people do some crazy feats of gaming and make the world a better place at the same time, okay?
so before we dive in a quick definition of speedrunning get it cuz it's a quick definition cuz it's
Okay
[a] speedrun is a playthrough of a game with the singular goal of achieving the fastest possible
Completion time there can be some informal rules around how you do it whether you have to complete the whole game or are allowed to
Glitch pass large chunks of it whether or not you have to do it all in one sitting
Whether you can use tools like emulators and save states to achieve the absolutely perfect run and So on
But fundamentally, it's about shaving seconds off a playthrough until you can beat a game in record time
There's a lot to be said about speedrunning. It's a fascinating phenomena from both a player and a developer perspective
It's grown a huge community and driven people to develop gaming skills that are really unbelievable
but today
I principally want to talk about how to develop speedrunning friendly games as that's something I'm seeing developers start to do and it's relatively unexplored
territory for design. As a developer
It's an amazing feeling watching somebody put in the time and dedication to speedrun your game
But it also raises a number of intriguing
Questions the speedrunning community is fairly large and very active in terms of putting up videos of their achievements
Which is awesome because it leads to a lot more exposure for great games that might otherwise get overlooked
But if you want to be cynical about it
Targeting the speedrunning community can also net you a lot of free marketing especially if you're a small indie developer with no marketing budget
This has led some developers to narrow their focus a little too much in their efforts to Target the speedrunning community
So let's talk about what you need to focus on if you want to make a good
speedrunning friendly game. First off, and this may sound weird,
But don't focus on trying to get speedrunners to play your game. That community is great,
And it's full of super dedicated Incredibly knowledgeable people
You don't have to pander to them in any way, if you just make a great game within certain parameters,
they'll find it. So as a developer,
What are those parameters what makes for a great speedrunning game first these games tend to be reflex based precision games.
Technically they don't have to be of course
I've watched somebody speedrun animal crossing, and I think it'd be awesome to see somebody speedrun getting to legend ranked on Hearthstone,
But speedruns tend to focus more on games like Super Mario, Tetris, Super Meat boy,
And these games are breathtaking to behold when somebody's really executing on the Madam master level. That is what speedrunning is about.
Now, that's an easy observation to make but we have to ask
What's the most important thing to creating one of these?
Reflex based precision games and while that may seem like a fairly straightforward question, with a fairly straightforward answer
I see a lot of devs attempting to Court the speedrunning Community
By leaving in crazy glitches or by simply creating all sorts of neat shortcuts for the player to ferret out
but the thing is that stuff isn't really at the heart of what makes a game great for speedrunning that stuff can be interesting and
Sometimes make a run even cooler
but the key to a great
Speedrunning game is almost always tight controls if you look at the majority of the popular speedrunning games out there
This is the one thing they have in common
focusing your development on making sure your controls are tuned and
Responsive is far more important than the bells and whistles this brings us to the second piece for a good speedrunning game
Versatility combined with consistency that was a weird sentence, it's true though pairing versatility and consistency may seem contradictory at first
So let me unpack that a bit to make a good speedrunning game
You need to provide the player with at least some versatility
and how they approach the problems the game presents there can't just be one right answer if there's a clear right way to do a
Perfect playthrough of a game eventually somebody will memorize all the actions they need to take and simply do that to be truly
Interesting for a speedrun there has to be a back and forth players have to be able to try minor
variations in order to shave fractions of a second off their time, but that versatility has to be coupled with
Consistency when a player does the same action it has to have exactly the same result [every] time
practicing for a speedrun involves meticulous
repetition with the space of a few pixels making a world of difference [for] the outcome of the run this means that the player has
To be able to replicate their actions and get identical results on a design front that's pretty difficult to achieve while still providing that
Versatility the place where this comes up the most though is enemy interactions scripted enemies like those you see in freedom planet
or dustforce are far more likely to deliver the type of
Consistency you're looking for than enemies driven by a complex Ai system if you want that old-school elegance of play don't get too complex
The bigger the system the more moving parts there are the more [likely] some of them will act in a way that doesn't appear consistent
to the player
also
If you decide you want to put random elements in while still attracting the speedrunning community [make] sure that the randomness basically?
Evens out [overplay] at least for master players. I mean there's an element of randomness to Tetris you never know
What blocks the game's going to give you to work with but while a run of bad blocks for you, or me might be?
Devastating for [a] player who's so good that they're consistently going through hundreds of blocks each run those
Instances of bad luck sort of even out there will be good and bad groups of blocks and every play through and over enough playthroughs
There's still a sort of consistency there that said there are always
Outliers and even the fact that I had to bring up that example of successful randomness points to that fact
Understanding the groundwork lets us push the bounds and hopefully that understanding will [help] many of you not only make more great
speedrunning games as we currently
Understand them but expand on what we consider a good speedrunning game to be I did want to [mention] one more thing about
Speedrunning games today, and that's patching patching brings up some interesting questions when it comes to building a game
That's good to speedrun right now many of the most popular speedrunning games are older
And that makes total sense to speedrun a game you have to be incredibly
Familiar with it to a level sometimes only gained through years of play
Additionally many of our older games because of constraints on things like the complexity of the AI had fewer systems
Interfering with your ability to practice the game in a consistent repeatable way
But the fact that so many of these are older games also means that many of these games were made in the era before
Patching was common
Now with patching being ubiquitous the question of a definitive version of a game is much more up in the air which of course means
That how we measure the best speedrun for a game gets a little bit more complicated not too much
I mean all it means is that we have to list the world record for a game not [buy] the game alone
But [also] the version number it's played on but still it's an added layer and as a developer
It's an interesting question as to whether you want to try to emulate that older style of releasing a finished game and never changing it
Ever or if you want to do something more modern with your speedrunning game
Considering how much the ability to patch allows you to improve titles?
I say patch away
but remember if you're really tied [in] [to] the community you might even be able to have some fun with it and
specifically patch things that in an enjoyable way allow players to think about the problem of how to
Just beat your game all over again. [all] [right]. We're done here [go] check out the games done quick marathon
There's a link down below. We'll see you there