IsraelHi! I tried your demo. I liked the concept and graphics, and it has potential! It is basically Celeste with guns, huh?
I had many issues with the input/controls, and some with the game itself.
I will start with the menus layout:
- Keyboard layout in main menu is overall weird. Why do you have only the "K"/"L" buttons as confirm or cancel? Space, Enter and Escape should work as well.
- While inside a level, I expected Escape to open the menu, but no, only Space opens and closes it.
- (Xbox) Controller buttons in the menus were fine for me.
Overall keyboard controls: I felt very restricted in what I could do. Personally I like to use the WASD buttons for movement if my right hand is using the mouse. But if it is a keyboard-only game, then I prefer using the arrow keys for movement with my right hand, and the left hand is using action keys. I played like this for years. Using both IJKL keys and arrow keys is super uncomfortable, your hands are too close to each other. Either make several keyboard control schemes to choose from, or just let us set custom keys binding, like many games let you, and that problem is solved. I tried playing with both WASD and IJKL, which I guess was your intended control scheme, but couldn't get my mind into it.
Xbox controls for movement: So, I ditched the keyboard and moved to an Xbox controller. Here, my biggest issue was movement while dashing in the air. Using the analog stick was quickly out of the question because it felt like the character did whatever was on his mind. Using the arrows pad was better, but in some parts that require precise maneuvering (like between lasers) it still was hard to control as precisely as I wanted. Suppose you are going up, and then immediately want to stop and go right instead. You will probably move your thumb in such a way that the character will move diagonally in up-right direction for a few moments, and sometimes it's all it takes to kill you. I got the hang of it after some time, but I still died a lot of times because of dashing into wrong places, and it was frustrating.
I guess I'm more used to use a controller for 3D games, not 2D games. There are exceptions, like Rayman Legends and Super Meatboy, but there you don't need to do fast movement maneuvering in all possible directions.
Note that I liked the dash movement, it was fun, but not on my controller.
Input for other actions:
- The grab action for nets and walls didn't always worked, I think? Probably if I press it too early or too late, and it seems to happen if combined with some other fast actions like dashing or shooting at the same time.
- If you are wearing a heavier gear, the base jump height is too low, and it is hard to even start a mid-air dash because you fall back to the ground fast.
- If you fall from a platform instead of jumping off of it, sometimes it is possible to air-dash and sometimes not, don't know why. If I can't dash then I am most probably going to fall to my death.
Now for some game related stuff:
- You should probably make the training level be more accessible. I first found the boss battle, and after he pwned me several times I quit, and then started the mission 1 level, and still had to experiment with all the controls myself.
- You asked for exploits. Well, the gear you are wearing can make a HUGE difference in many places. Altering it can turn a level either into a piece of cake, a moderate challenge, or just plain impossible. I guess it is intended, yes? Having to figure out the "best" gear for each level, each with its pros and cons? It still took me some time to figure out what I was doing wrong. When doing mission 1, I actually replaced the default bulletproof armor to someting else (I think I still tried to figure out the menus). Boom, the level is almost impossible now. Didn't help that I still tried to learn the controls (withou practice from the training level) and the two ships anihilating you as soon as you fly upwards.
But when I figure this stuff out, it kinda felt like a cheap way to pass the levels, I think? For levels 1 and 2, use bullet proof. Level 3, explosion proof. Level 4, laser proof. There, you are now almost invincible. Level 4 was especially easy, you just stand in the corner and always shoot right, and the ship can't do anything.
For challenges, I used the fragile gear with extended dashes, and you can dash your way through large sections of a level, and skip some (intended?) nets/parts. As a speedrunner, not gonna complain about that one :) My overall best challenges total time was something around 54 seconds, with this way.
- At mission 5, which has a different gameplay style, the movement with my controller was much more smooth and comfortable, and it was a nice change of pace. It certainly didn't feel like fighting the controls as in the other levels (as stated above). Still don't know what to think about it in terms of speerunning, because it is an autoscroller.
- Instant respawn was very sweet, and you did it exactly how it should be.
- I liked the ingame timer, and the controller overlay that shows the buttons you are pressing at any time. I guess it will be weird if you use the keyboard, though.
Now for some overall bugs/issues regarding other stuff: (This is a free QA test at this point, isn't it)
- Challenges times are not saved if you quit from the game and go back.
- The challenges list save the LAST time you got on the level, not the FASTEST. C'mon.
- Normal levels or missions should be speedrunnable as well, I think. At least save and show their best time as well?
- After finishing a level, be it a challenge or not, the ending screen should have a "replay", "continue" and "exit" options, not just "continue". Having to continue to next level and then quit is just messy.
- If you touch a checkpoint in any level, dying returns you to the checkpoint, but also restarts the ingame timer. It should only happen if restarting from start of level.
- In the level menu, "Restart Level" actually restarts from checkpoint if you touched it. You should fix that to actually RESTART the level. And maybe add a "restart from last checkpoint" as a separate option.
- If you touch a checkpoint, quit the level, and enter the level back again, you start from the checkpoint.
- You should maybe add an option to turn in-game dialogue off. While it is not relevant to the challenges themselves, if you try to "speedrun" a story mission you will always have to go through the dialogue whenever you start, die, or restart the level.
I didn't run any long run (30+ minutes) yet, but even for short runs I use notes occasionally. Sometimes the notes are on my splits names, sometimes they are external.
If I am not doing much practice before the first run, it may take me about 10-50 tries before I can remember everything (depends on the game of course).
If you are asking how to add a new category to the game, you should ask the game moderators for that. The game forums also have a thread called "category suggestions", so you can go there. https://www.speedrun.com/hypixel_sb/thread/ggl22
Also worth mentioning that you should try contacting the moderators before posting in that thread, as it being a last resort. The moderators have a twitch/discord accounts, you can try calling them there.
Perhaps you should request this in the feedback thread: https://www.speedrun.com/the_site/thread/g79jt Currently you can only choose from a list of predetermined colors (with or without gradient). I guess that "green" is closer to your shade.
I don't know if anyone is gonna see this, seeing that the game is super inactive, but whatever.
I was interested in trying to speedrun this game, but then saw that the world record itself IS A PICTURE, and it killed my motivation completely. I can maybe understand if you allow submitting picture proofs up to a certain threshold, but this is completely preposterous.
To understand the problem, check my super duper awesome new world record, which only took me about 15 minutes to get!
Is it fake? Yes. Can you tell by looking at the picture alone? probably not.
Another useless glitch: If you jump on a wall from the left side, then press right and left together, you will stay stuck on the wall. Doesn't work on walls from the right side.
EDIT: this glitch actually has a use. If you "get stuck" on the side of a crate which is between you and a wall (so the crate is like a wall for you), you can press down and you will enter the crate immediately. It also works when standing on the ground.
So, what you want to do is touch a crate which is facing a wall from the left side, and then press right+left+down.
@Niqkel found this strat accidentally. I will make a video, explaining this stuff. As I see it, this trick can save time on level 6 and 9.
For making the timer smaller outside of OBS, I think it is just a matter of resizing the timer window itself, no? I'm not familiar with WSplit, so I don't know how it behaves.
Anyway, for the shrinking timer in OBS, to me it looks like there is a Crop/Pad filter on it. I assume that the "display capture" is the screen, and the "window capture" is the timer? Check if there are any filters on the timer, by right clicking on the timer window --> filters. Alternatively, you can try right clicking on the timer window --> Transform --> Reset Transform, if there were any resizing shenanigans happening on it.
What exactly is your question?
If you ask how to request a game for the site, it can be done here: https://www.speedrun.com/requestgame If you ask if the game will be accepted, then high chance it would not, because it is extremely short per the game request rules.
I think that games with special symbols in their names have different priority in the search results. Your game is actually called Rain™ (at least on this site). The game does pop up in the games list if you click on the "More..." option.
I noticed something similar when you search "Ugh". The actual game name is "Ugh!", but you get many other games (which contain the letters ugh, like "through the woods") well before this one.
Hmm, very strange. I tried your link as well (by copying it and pasting to the browser), and it gave me a google search result. I then typed the entire link myself, and then it did work as intended.
That working link is: https://www.speedrun.com/api/v1/users/Stun
Now, since they are looking the same, I put the two links in a text-diff program and got different results (yours at the left contains some weird symbols):
I assume you talk about the new "Super 1-1 Challenge" game? Well, from the game request rules:
[quote]Game types such as rom hacks, mods, mobile games, webgames, gamejolt, itch.io, and steam games will be held to some level of scrutiny. • The game should have a reasonable length such as 5 minutes or longer. • The game should show that a reasonable level of effort has been put into development from a functionality standpoint. • The game should have been played by a reasonably large number of people. • The gameplay should show some potential for optimization through speedrunning. • Fangames with common names that create confusion in the search bar may also be held to a higher standard. There are hundreds of generic Mario fangames.[/quote]
You may disagree with those, but those are the current rules nonetheless. Also, when requesting a game, you should show most of the game, not just a little portion of it. Technically we can say that the any% 16 seconds run does show the game "from start to finish", but let's be honest, this run shows almost nothing about the game itself.
About other games on the site being faster/shorter, that's irrelevant, most of those games are games which got approved in the past, before the current rules kicked in.
You might have better luck if you show a 100% run of the game, or anything similar. That run will be longer AND will show the entire game with it's potential. If it's still too short (below 5 minutes for example), then the game will probably not be accepted anyway.
When you use the request on https://www.speedrun.com/api/v1/users/Pseudo it does a redirect (status code 302) to a link with the ID, given by the "Location" response header. Then, the second request does return a json with the relevant ID in it.
Seems to me like it should work for you.
Just wanted to pop for a sec and say that low bitrate probably WAS the issue all along. I uploaded a video with 4500kbps (after tinkering with OBS) and so far it's fantastic.
Thank you guys again for the help!
