As I thought the planned ingame speedrun mode and build in online highscore will most likely be more appealing for casual players. I see that it might be possible to cheat and external leader boards with video proof will be more reliable. To counter the cheating I had the idea to attach some form of ghost data to each submitted time. Be it for internal varification or maybe even so everyone can download and replay the run from others to confirm it's legitimacy and learn some new tricks or short cuts. Of course this can't prevent tool assisted runs (are they even a thing outside of emulator runs?)

Regarding the timer there are two possibilities. Use the system time / delta time and have a "real" timer that is independent from the game performance. Or add 1/60s every frame to the timer as the game will run with 60fps and be frame rate dependent. The later would need a system to detect longer periods of slight slowdowns or some big spikes of fps drops and invalidate the run.

Regarding the planned (dialogue-)cutscenes, I want to keep them as short as possible and in addition make them skipable. But there might be some mid-level moments of unskipable cutscenes but they will be just a few seconds long. Examples for this are these GIFs I posted on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/CatboyGame/status/1002935039003451392 https://twitter.com/CatboyGame/status/1005473694012059648

And yes I agree that we should focus on making just a fun game and not sacrifice things to please speedrunners but there might be some simple things you wish to be considered that have no impact on normal players or may even benefit both player groups.

Regarding instant drawing of dialogue text I was actually thinking about classical (but fast) letter by letter appearance for the normal story mode. But replace all text either with "..." or skip dialogues altogether for the separate speed run mode. Instant appearance might be a more elegant solution for the speed run mode.

As you mentioned to stop the timer during loading times. I was asking myself if it was a good idea to stop the timer during the result screen at the end of each level and give the player some time (up to 60s) to take a look at the stats and in case the full game runs will also count for the single level leader boards check the placement there. How about a (one-time) toilet break that could be taken during one of the result screens and expand the time out by some minutes. Too much of a comfort feature and possibly exploitable?

I also don't think the timer should pause when the player pauses the game in the middle of a level. Maybe the pause function should be disabled entirely inside the speed run mode.

@blueYOSHI: The current internal version has a result screen that shows how many % of collectibles and enemies you have collected/beaten. Regarding the gamepad it also supports DirectInput in addition to XInput in the newest version. But what is still missing is an option menu with free button config which might be necessary as DirectInput gamepads are not standardized. (It's on the todo-list either way, just not high priority right now)

Thanks for all the feedback!

Some of you mentioned the ending of To the Moon. Personally I think the moment at which River asked Johnny what he sees in the stars and kept asking him "What else?" had a bigger impact as I suddenly realized what River wanted to tell Johnny all the time but she couldn't because he lost his memories. And until this moment it seemed that she got somehow insane and crazy when she got older with all the bunnies but all she wanted to achieve was remind him how they first met and why he fell in love with her.

EDIT: That's the scene I'm talking about

Hey, I'm part of a two-man team that develops a 16-bit action platformer called Super Catboy and I would appreciate some feedback from active speedrunners. What is alright and what could be improved from a speedrunners perspective?

A little gif of the game:

A playable demo is linked on our website: http://www.catboy.de

I have also a bunch of general questions you can answer without playing the demo:

• What do you think about an ingame speedrun mode with a build-in timer and online highscore. I think it would be used by casual speedrunners but might be ignored by more serious ones that are used to their own time measurement tools and external ranking sites.

• Should the separate speedrun mode auto-skip all dialogues and cutscenes? Or is part of the challenge to save some milliseconds during dialogues by pressing the "next" button at the right moments?

• In case the speedrun mode will be divided into a full game and a single levels section. Should the achieved level times from a full game run be counted for the single level rankings?

• Right now the game has some RNG involved like the start looking direction of enemies and how long they idle and in which direction the continue to walk after idling. I assume it would be better to have no RNG involved in this matter so the enemies are always standing at the same point and looking in the same direciton as long as the runner has a similar pace. What the game already has is a constant random seed so as long as the player is doing the same actions in the same order all RNG events should resolve in the same way.

• Currently it is easy to skip (almost) all enemies by dashing past them. Should I force players to fight all enemies. Either by make them more aware and reactive to dashing players or stop the scrolling of the screen if there are to many enemies on screen. During playtest events and exhibitions it was never a problem. Most players fought against all enemies without the extra incentives. And it might be ok for (non 100%) speedrunners to skip the fighting against normal enemies.

Hope this was not to much text. Looking forward to hear some opinions on these topics.