Making Games with speedrun potential
2 years ago
Argentina

Fangames too, let's talk about how we make games with speedrun potential. If you aren't a game developer you can talk too! Maybe giving ideas, or talking about your favourite games and how are speedruned.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
French Southern Territories

Games that are made for speedrunning usually suck to speedrun. Adding mechanics that are only used to go faster, making everything go way too fast, and not patching glitches during development are all things I've seen used in "speedgames" These ruin a casual player's opinion of the game. The best speedrun games are usually ones that aren't supposed to be speedrun games. Mario 64, Celeste, and Minecraft were not developed to be fun speedgames, they were just supposed to be fun games to play. The best way to make your game good for speedrunning is to focus on just making a good game in general, and then maybe adding a few features such as an accurate in game timer, an easy way to reset your save, and level select.

Of course, there are a few exceptions to this, for example, roblox speedrun 4.

MechanicalSnail, Ivory and 7 others like this
United States

Yeah, making a game with the intent of speedrunning rarely works out well. Speedrunning, believe it or not, is still kind of a niche thing. This is especially the case when it actually comes to running games- the majority of folks in the scene are merely spectators of those who speedrun.

If you want your game to be speedrun, just make it a good and solid game people would want to play. Speedrunners will pick it up soon enough.

For example: To make a game more appealing to speedrunners without negatively affecting the casual audience, the best thing is to add plenty of Quality of Life improvements. Easily skippable dialogue and cutscenes, colorblind modes and control styles, making sure the game loads consistently, fixing up any potential crashes, etc. These are all things that anyone playing the game would find good.

Now, back to meme posting.

Ivory, Pear and 2 others like this
France

also one of the fun parts of speedrunning is about discovering unintended exploits and skips, i think that what makes speedrunning entertaining is how different the speedrun can be from a casual playthrough and you won't have that with a game that's entirely tailored around speedrunning

Walgrey and Merl_ like this
Québec

Superliminal is a great game made for speedrunning. ( not sure if it is one but they have igt so i guess so )

MinecraftGaming likes this
Valhalla

It's similar to games made for ESPORTS. You can't force these things. People are gonna play your game competitively if it's a fun game, pvp or otherwise. Basically focus on making a good game rather than a "speedrun friendly" game, whatever that is. A lot of speedrunners like the challenge of finding exploits or doing things against the dev path. Part of speedrunning is trying to break the rules of the game.

Ivory and Pear like this
Vermont, USA
Ivory
He/Him, She/Her, They/Them
2 years ago

It's a case-by-case basis. Like merl_ said, don't design your game to be speedran, rather design your game to be fun to play and then speedruns will soon come. Never design a level off of an intentional skip, rather, leave it in if it feels intuitive enough for both a normal player and a speedrunner while not entirely put there on purpose. A good example of this at the moment is Vibrant Venture, a game in development right now which has normal gameplay 100% of the time, but also some skips left in for speedrunners to take advantage of if they want to.

Merl_ likes this
French Southern Territories

A good way to approach it might be like how the bugsnax devs did it. They found a few skips in their game, but left them in because a casual player probably wouldn't find them, and they could only be done by purposefully seeking out a way to skip the game. However, they patched out several skips that were often triggered accidentally to avoid ruining the casual playthrough.

Quivico, Ivory and 2 others like this
French Southern Territories

Another thing I will add is that if your game has a skip in it and you decide to patch it out, make sure to make previous versions of the game available so that any established leaderboards dont get screwed up.

Quivico, Ivory and 2 others like this