“There were a bunch of items in the game speedrunners were disappointed to get,” says Clark. Designing features for those players becomes an exercise in learning what systems in your game will work best for them.

In a platformer or any general action game, a speedrunner is going to be the sort of player who avoids most sidequests or hidden objectives, and will therefore have the lowest amount of health and desire o deal the highest amount of damage. 'Whenever I was testing something, I was going as fast as I could because I enjoyed that.” 3) Accommodate Low-Power PlaythroughsĬlark’s biggest lesson from watching those Early Access speedrunners was one about how to define a speedrunner as a player type. “I enjoy speedrunning games myself,' he says. ( Crypt Of the Necrodancer Online Racing).Īnd Clark himself just finds that speedrunning, especially for a procedurally generated game, is a good way to test his own bugs and design. Though this early speedrunning would contribute to some major design decisions, Clark indicates that this community outreach was the foundation for a specific fanbase that would stick around with his game after it officially launched, as the “Balls of Steel” tournament series gave way to the CONDOR speedrunning league. Clark himself began making record-breaking runs on the game with his newfound community and commentating on Early Access speedrunning tournaments. “We thought 'that's really boring to play, and really boring to watch.' So we put in a rule: if you're beating the game at a certain speed, the wandering encounters don't show up any more.” 2) Spearhead the Speedrunning Community Yourself!įor Ryan Clark's Crypt of the Necrodancer, speedrunning started as soon as the game hit Early Access. One example of this arose with the game's wandering encounters-enemies who were programmed to randomly appear on the map with no easy predictability.ĭ'Angelo and his team saw that speedrunners would load back out, then back in, rather then deal with a randomly spawning enemy. One quick sign that a speedrunner has found a big flaw in your game, according to D’Angelo, is if they reset to the main menu and load back in rather than face an obstacle. Since speedrunners rely on the ability to move as quickly as possible through a given space, there was no way to ‘cheat’ some of Shovel Knight’s levels, and D’Angelo and his team had to make regular calls as to which levels needed a flow improvement, and which ones were intentionally difficult. In one Shovel Knight example, speedrunners found flaws in D’Angelo’s timing for moving platforms in a room, sometimes pointing out there was literally no perfect way to move through a space, since platforms wouldn’t be ready after they easily cleared some earlier obstacle. Says D’Angelo, “We had made a bunch of games together at Wayforward and we kept seeing speedrunners play our games, and we said 'I wish we had that feedback before we shipped out a game.’ D’Angelo says their new speedrunning friends automatically climb the skill curve of a game and begin hitting the flow interruptions of a given level much faster than they or normal testers would, whether it's a bug or just a flaw in platforming design. If you’re making a game you think will be of special interest to speedrunners, why not make them some of your first playtesters? David D’Angelo, a developer on Shovel Knight, explains that having speedrunners test your game out first gives you some clear advantages. So if you’re developing a game with speedrunners in mind, what are some of the best practices for your development cycle? We talked to developers Derek Yu, Thomas Happ, David D’Angelo and Ryan Clark, whose games all make frequent appearances at speedrunning events, to learn some of their observations after watching players blaze through their game. Players compete with each other for high scores and fast run-throughs, but they’re also developing strategies, socializing, and organizing around these specialized playthroughs, all while audiences watch for the joy and thrill of crazily high-skilled gameplay. It’s a style of play that many enjoy, and it's the cornerstone of many burgeoning communities.

Record-setting runs on games like The Legend of Zelda or Double Dragon are as old as consoles and arcades themselves, and games like Metroid famously rewarded fast playthroughs with specialized endings.īut in 2016, speedrunning isn’t just about handful of elite players jockeying for position in the record books.

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