Speed runs

Someone is able to play through system shock 2 in 12 minutes, I watched the whole lp of it that took 8 hours. Do you think when your designing your game its important to make it so the speed runner community can actually blast through your game (making your vids skippable, the audio cutoff etc).

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBiA98i89bbWA5zvLKGSzNKKp3GRKpP1h

 

Making challenging levels will raise popularity among Speed Runners

 

You should always let the player pause/skip cutscenes IMO. It also helps if your game has some handy exploitable glitches. Some of the Super Mario 64 speed runs are absolutely ridiculous!

 

Make sure you character doesn't move faster diagonally. I hate that

 

Don't know why it really matters. It's not like most of the speed running community isn't based around games that were never intended to be played that way.

 

Do I think about speedrunners when designing my game? Not really. If your game turns out interesting for them, they'll come.
Part of the appeal of speerunning (at least for me), is how they find new ways, where there weren't any. If you start adding tricks and features for speedrunners, well, they won't speedrun anymore. They'll just play the game as intended, albeit faster.

Allowing to skip cutscenes isn't something you should do for speedrunners, it's something you should do because it's good gamedesign. If someone isn't interested in watching your cutscenes, forcing them will not improve their experience.

 

Normalizing is for chumps.

 

This. ESPECIALLY if your game has any sort of replayability. Even if I loved your cutscenes the first time around, sometimes i'm really more excited about trying your level with my unorthodox character build. Or, if i die to a difficult boss, don't make me sit through his 10 minute monologue again. That epic plot twist isn't as epic after hearing it for the 4th time in a row.

A caveat though - do not include important information in a skippable cutscene. Or at least, don't make it the ONLY source of that information. I've played a few games where i skipped a cutsence that told me what i needed to do next, only to find that there was no place that logged the objective, and worse - the cutscene couldn't be triggered again. It also hurts players that quit for 3 months, come back to pick the game up, and are utterly lost as to what the next step is.

I could keep finding more tangents... but before I get too far off topic: Skippable cutscenes helps speed runners, without necessarily designing for them. Its just solid practice, for the most part.

 

I think you should worry much, much more about actually making a fun game. It's really difficult to do so.

 

Reminds me of Speedrun Sam! One of the design Persona's from this Gamasutra article. Designing for persona's seems like a powerful idea. Though, I don't think I've really grokked it yet.

Gigi

 

I came close to doing that in my current project.

One of the things I did as I started my mechanical prototype / the basic design of Sara the Shieldmage, was I asked myself in my mechanical design document, 'Who would play this game?'

I then consulted my handy D&D Dungeon Master's guide for a list of relevant gamer types (See the part about D&D 4.0) and gave each one a check indicating expected happiness, equal sign indicating ambivalence, or a cross indicating antipathy, and detailed reasons why that sort of player would feel the way they would about my greater vision of the game. For instance, an Explorer would love my game, because I love having secret areas (I'm an explorer myself!) A Slayer would be ambivalent; there are monsters to kill, but the plot, puzzles, and exploration are the keystones of my greater vision. A Power Gamer probably wouldn't care, because my design focuses on qualitative changes to gameplay, there is nearly no min-maxing to be done.

 

I remember playing ff10 and there was a 10 minute unskippable cutscene before the boss fight which i kept losing to. Not only did i stop playing the game itself i stopped buying any final fantasy games all together after that.

 

The irony there is they actually got better about making them skippable after that. I'm pretty sure most of 12 was skippable and 13 seems about the same as 12

 

Show, don't tell.
Although some developers didn't internalize this concept yet, games are not movies. You shouldn't rely on cutscenes with super-dramatic camera perspectives for telling your story. Tell it during gameplay.