Hey there!

I'll be upfront with you all from the get-go, I feel that is the best way to approach a community I am genuinely wanting to engage with!

I'm Daley, Community Manager over at Coatsink. We recently released a platformer called Shu, and we made it with the Speedrunning community very much in mind.

As a company we wanted to involve the the SRing community, without necessarily having to BUY the game - this isn't a sales pitch , it's more of a plea to try the game we very proud of.

Anyway, I've set up a time-trial competition, which you can enter via a demo of the game which you can find on Steam, the fastest time on the demo version winning a copy of the game: http://coatsink.com/shu-community-time-trial-shu-down-begins/

It's always been our plan, from the conception of Shu, to get the Speedrunning Community on-board, and I guess you could call this a (potentially futile) attempt.

I am sorry if these types of posts are frowned upon, feel free to string me up haha, but I am hoping to engage with some of you at the very least, we want to appeal to you.

Anyway, enough blabbering out of me. I would be very grateful of any advice, places to look to speak to Speedrunners, as thus far I have only found this forum and Reddit! You are an elusive lot - that or you are too quick to see.

• Daley

No, this is fine, developers have come here before to say "hey you guys might like this" and no one popped a blood vessel.

Does your game support controller?

Interesting! Can you give us an overview of what type of game it is/the kinds of mechanics it utilises/how long the game is? Also, how long is this demo competition on for? Can't really check the link right now is all, though you've caught my attention.

Recorded a time which I'll upload privately, was just taking screenshots but now I want to record runs for proof.

It's totally sound to post things like this here, in fact it's actually super awesome and cool.

"as thus far I have only found this forum and Reddit! You are an elusive lot - that or you are too quick to see. "

This is kinda true because the idea of "speedrunning" as one large community is largely not a thing, it consists of tons of smaller and generally mildly overlapping communities centered around an individual video game or series which makes it kind of hard to get the word out to "speedrunning" at large. I don't really have any advice for dealing with that, this place and Reddit are about the only places where this sort of thing seems appropriate to post but, just so you know the score.

Punchy go beat my IL

sod off

The only problem I have with the game is that the keyboard controls are very spread apart, making it rather taxing to do attempts. I haven't tried the gamepad controls since I'd need to set up my PS3 controller.

Other than that, seems like a pretty fun game.

My fastest time atm is 1:36.43.

Alright, so after a few days of on/off work, I think I'm done with trying to improve this IL any further. My final time stands at 1:31.75, which is fairly strong I think. I couldn't have done it without the help of some of my friends, including Sonikkustar, LylatRanbewb and others. Apparently I'm really bad at noticing that shorter routes exist in stages, wasting over a full second... If anything, this should show how community-centric speedrunning really is; I had a 1:33 and thought I couldn't improve that much further until it was pointed out to me "... Why are you taking that higher path? You can just walk through the building path on the bottom." Additionally, others noticed some actual issues in the game, which I'll go into detail just now, as I want to give my overall thoughts on the demo:

PROS:

• This game handles and plays REALLY smoothly. Controls are very tight and responsive, and every time I made a mistake it actually felt like it was my own fault rather than the result of a badly-programmed game dropping inputs, as is the case in many 2D sidescrollers. Top marks for this one.

• It looks gorgeous. The environments and textures are very pleasant to look at, and there was a lot of variety just in the demo. Makes me want to see what the rest of the game has to offer.

• The overall design of the demo stage is very conducive to learning how to use the mechanics as you go along; each new obstacle is introduced individually, and the methods for traversing them are generally very intuitive without the game really needing to hold your hand. Again, good design I would say.

• Very good pacing, there are no spots where you just have to wait around for stuff to happen, and the player largely dictates the pace at which the level progresses. This is always very welcome in sidescrollers.

CONS:

• The mechanics themselves aren't especially technical, at least not from what I saw. This one is harder to call a straight up Con because it's a matter of personal preference. Personally, I prefer platformers/sidescrollers to have complex movement mechanics that center around exploiting ways to maintain high speed and transfer momentum between different states, when this demo was more about just finding ways to never stop moving. I'm sure the full game will feature more complex level design and strat implementation that simply doesn't exist in the demo stage, but for the demo stage itself I found myself just holding Right and timing actions 90% of the time.

• Related to the previous point, simplistic controls are fine on their own as it makes the task of optimising ILs more palatable, the only thing is that if the full game follows the same vein, it may suffer from lack of variety and depth. I'm suspending judgment on this one until I try the full game as it's perfectly likely that a demo stage is deliberately simplistic for the purpose of introducing new players to the game.

• Testing from another user showed that this game actually suffers from a serious problem under certain circumstances: FPS-based physics. To the developers: If you weren't aware that this was an issue in the game, this really needs patching if possible. One spot in particular plays entirely differently depending on how your game performs. Around 18 seconds into my IL, there's a section where you have to jump left onto a red awning, because the checkpoint and air current to the right is JUST out of reach of a jump from the platform below. On my game, I consistently could not get this jump from below, at all, and my game runs at a stable 60 FPS. One of my friends, Kinkycadence, found that he could very consistently land this jump as he was getting extra height, and his game runs at 15-20 FPS according to him (This also begs the question, why no resolution/quality options for the demo?). This is an issue in other games, where performance/framerate issues cause the game mechanics themselves to behave differently, and it actually makes it so that neither I, nor anyone else playing a game that performs 'correctly' can get the best times, since FPS-based tricks are confirmed to exist in at least one spot. If I could perform that jump, it would save half a second on its own.

So overall, most of my Cons may not amount to much if the full game proves to have more meat to it than the demo suggests, which I fully expect. I definitely enjoyed the time I spent on the demo, and want to play more of the game, so suffice it to say I like this game and I encourage others to try it, definitely a solid game so far.