Hi!

I'm a gamedev about to release a platformer called MineRalph, and as part of the release, we're doing a speedrunning competition with a decent prizepool. In order to avoid cheating or breaking the game as much as possible, we've put together a ruleset to try and explain how we want the submissions to look like.

I'd love to get some feedback on if we're missing something obvious, if something could be worded better or if something is stupid/should be removed before we start going live with it!

https://mineralph.chopchopgames.dk/competition/

Let me know what you think!

"NO VIDEO SPLICES! All runs must be recorded from start to finish with no stops/cuts"

I'm not familiar with the game so I don't know what splice tells there might be (e.g. cycling animations between level transitions, continuous music during loads, etc), but you may want to set some criteria for videos, e.g. "Must include game audio", "Must be recorded in 480p minimum" etc. If there are no game features that provide giveaways for spliced runs, then it might be tricky to root them out regardless of video quality though.

@drgrumble hmm. Yeah that might be an issue.

Do you not think the ingame timer itself would suffice in telling the time apart? like looking at the timer & comparing the end time with the time on the highscore list.

I like the idea about minimum resolution requirement and ingame audio, that's definitely going to make it a lot harder.

Any other ideas?

Ah sorry I didn't spot that there is IGT. Ye IGT is likely to make it pretty hard to cheat (but never underestimate the resourcefulness of a scumbag).

[quote=drgrumble]Must be recorded in 480p minimum[/quote]

Having a minimum for video resolution on its own is worthless. Resolution is only one factor of video quality. You can easily make "480p" footage that's completely unwatchable, and likewise you can also make 360p footage that's more than adequate from a proof standpoint. There's a lot of things that factor into how good a video looks (framerate, resolution, bitrate, the encoder used, etc), so setting a hard (and somewhat arbitrary) minimum on only one of those factors doesn't really accomplish much.

Usually just saying "watchable quality" should be fine, but you could also include a recommended minimum resolution, bitrate, etc. That way you're not necessarily enforcing an arbitrary quality minimum (which, in the case of bitrate, would be impossible anyway) while still giving people an idea of what's acceptable.