I am releasing a game on Steam tomorrow, December 16th called Jetscout: Mystery of the Valunians.
The focus in making this was an enjoyable experience for any player, but as a big fan of speedruns, I think runners who like challenging 2D platformers would be interested to hear about it. As a physics-based platformer, Jetscout is crammed full of massive risk vs reward situations for speedrunning. Casual players will land on every platform which act as checkpoints, but this both takes about a second of animation and completely kills any momentum so it will be avoided as much as possible in runs. However there is limited fuel which only restores by landing on a checkpoint so you can only skip so many at a time, and a single mistake resulting in a death will set you back to your last activated checkpoint. I had a beta tester describe the game as "Super Meat Boy with a jetpack." This part is more a matter of personal preference, but Jetscout features pretty minimal RNG.
To give you the quickest look at what a run would be like without even playing the game, I recorded an Any% run myself on Hard difficulty. It took 45:46 on the in-game timer (which pauses during load screens) and just around 50minutes total. I died 20ish times. Have a look here: It's an unlisted video to hide spoilers from casual players subscribed to my channel.
In addition there are unlockable bonus missions which are brutally difficult. a 100% run would be pretty nightmarish in my mind but there are probably some up for the challenge.
As far as QoL for speedrunning in this game, standalone cutscenes are skippable, there are multiple save slots, it's very quick to restart a mission, and all menus are fully functional with a game controller on the next frame after opening, without having to wait for window animations to complete. There's a handful of dialogue bits that proved difficult to safely program a skip and still maintain game stability since several important events are also happening, but button-mashing gets you through these pretty quickly.
You can see the official trailer and more info on steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1395410/Jetscout_Mystery_of_the_Valunians/
For the speedrunning community who have given me hours of entertainment and many hours of background streams while working on Jetscout, I'd be happy to give any active runner a steam key if you pm me. Also I hope this thread doesn't come off as just an ad - I've thought about this game being a good speedrun game from very early on in development!
Thanks,
Dustin dustinaux@gmail.com
