Personal Suggestions for timing runs of this game
4 years ago
Poland

So, I've been watching the newest PBs by maitrecraft1234 (congrats on the PBs btw, really nice runs!) and I've noticed something. Even though Maitre's run was using a very similar route to my run, and even had more mistakes than the current WR, their current pb is only a second behind the WR run. This made me really curious as I didn't know what could've caused this kind of time save. And then I noticed something:

Load times. Turns out Maitre's runs had fast load times, faster than the ones in my run, causing such time save. This is a bit of an issue in my opinion. It values load times over actually skillful gameplay, which makes a massive impact in a run like Bounce Tales. This brings me to two ideas, one worse, one better.

  1. Make all times submitted on the leaderboards not include load times (worse, less time investment needed) - This would allow for rewarding actually skillful play and allowing the WR holder to keep their WR as long as their run was actually the most skillful of them all.

  2. Make all times submitted on the leaderbords be displayed in two different times: with and without load times (better, much more time investment needed, potential leaderboard rebrand needed). This would allow for people to see the fastest run overall and the fastest run without load times, rewarding both low load times AND skillful play. It would require a bit of work to upkeep but would allow for fair competition between the players.

This issue is never present in single-level runs since load times don't affect those runs.

Alternatively, we can all go the Sonic The Hedgehog way of handling timing of runs and time runs according to the timer on the top of the screen. Additionally, some extra time loss could be added per death to accomodate for that, but this may be even more of a hassle than the other methods, so this is the biggest maybe from all of these suggestions.

All of these are suggestions that I think would allow fair competition during the runs of this game (as much as this game may be kinda a meme run it's a game of my childhood and I absolutely adore it).

One more thing from myself: As small as this community is, how about making a Bounce Tales Speedrunning Discord Server? I think that would be cool for people looking to get into running this game/discussing things happening on the forums/on the leaderboards.

Cheers!

Edited by the author 4 years ago
Fundeeraaja likes this
Päijät-Häme, Finland

The load times are affected by the emulator correct? Why not just use the same emulator? We can discuss this more on the Discord server you suggested here https://discord.gg/hzTZcsW

HazelLurantis likes this