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[mhughson]

I am working on a little game for #1GAM (http://www.onegameamonth.com/) and feeling like it could make a decent speed-run game.

I don't know much about the community, so I was wondering if you know of any articles or first hand knowledge, of what kinds of features make a game "speed run friendly".

Obviously it needs to be a great game, but I am thinking more stuff like:

• Built in timer
• Ability to reset levels instantly
• Run in windowed mode
• Etc

Here is a little video after 1 week into development:

Watch full, 60FPS video here.

[SirNiko]

I remember seeing this thread on a speedrunning forum, so here's a link to some commentary from speedrunners.

In game timers, instant resets, and skippable cutscenes (especially if they can be turned off) are all useful.

Be considerate of how you use randomness in your game, so that players have the ability to deal with bad luck.

In general, though, just make the game fun to play. If you do that, somebody is likely to want to speedrun it regardless of convenience.

[mhughson]

Thanks SirNiko!  That's exactly the kind of thing I am looking for.

[s0]

keep in mind that speedrunning is a spectator sport, so focus on making your game fun to watch as well as play.

[SirNiko]

Also, since I'm thinking about it,

During the TAS Block of AGDQ this year they did a race for an original game designed specifically for speedrunning. It might be worth a watch, as they talk a little about how they designed the game to be fun to run. Notably, they intentionally introduced some glitches for speedrunners to exploit in order to make the process of routing the game more challenging.

[MAVW]

Be considerate of how you use randomness in your game, so that players have the ability to deal with bad luck.

+1, if you watch speedruns you can see how consistent these guys are with their runs and generally some bad RNG moments is enough to throw them off track.

moral of the story, use random responsibly kids

You should create a thread over /r/speedrun, I'm sure they'll have lots of things to suggest.

[Raptor85]

+2 on the rng, if possible, don't use "real" rng AT ALL, have everything be determinate based on ingame things (so if played the same way every time things should turn out the same, especially snes/genesis/nes era a lot of games that APPEAR to have rng actually do this, for instance things will spawn/move based on position on the screen when entering, etc.)

nothing is more frustrating in a speedrun than having something random that can cause a reset due to time loss thats 100% out of your control

[mhughson]

Thanks for all the great feedback!

The game is done now, and I would love to hear what you think! It's free, and available here:

Download Now!