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.