I'd like to make the game I'm working on friendly and appealing to speedrunners, but since I'm not really a speedrunner myself, I figured I'd ask the speedrun community how best to do this.

From a technical standpoint, I figure I should at least have:

• A game timer for the whole run of the game.
• A timer for each level.

Is there a way to connect these timers to speedrun software (or at least expose a way to make it easier for the speedrun software to identify when the game starts, levels change, etc?)

I imagine the game timer should only count actual gameplay ticks, not loading time (to make it fair and consistent for different systems), right? What about pausing the game?

From an appeal standpoint, this is what I'm working on that I hope speedrunners will find attractive:

• Momentum based movement, where you can gain and maintain speed.
• Mechanics like adding velocity on jumps so you can jump on ramps or ledges while moving up to gain extra height to find shortcuts and such.
• Crouch sliding to build speed on downward slopes
• Speedrun mode (enables timer display and skips non-gameplay portions of the game, like cutscenes)
• Attacks that can be used for mobility as well as combat, like a punch that gives a small burst of speed forward, but can also be used to punch off walls for an even larger impulse.
• More advanced movement abilities that unlock as the game progresses, like acceleration based grapple swinging.
• No RNG.

• 100hz physics update rate for super fluid movement on high refresh rate monitors.

Do these sound appealing? What types of things would make you interested in speedrunning a game? Fist of the Forgotten is the name of the game I'm working on, by the way.