What Makes A Game Speedrun Friendly?

Speedrunning is a beautiful game living within every game. I love it. But not every game is equally speedrun friendly. Getting into high-end speedrunning is daunting. It's a time sink and can be extremely frustrating if a few design decisions go the wrong way. You can design a game to be more speedrun friendly, though, and to more of your game's players than you might think. Let's talk about how you can design a game to give the thrill of The Run to everyone!

Featuring:
Neon White go play it now
Celeste
Demon Turf
Stuntman
Elden Ring
Fire Emblem
Goldeneye

#neonwhite #gamedesign #celeste

[PokeHearts]

One of the things that kept me playing Mario Kart 7 was being able to race against random ghosts that have better times than you and it was my goal to take some of those courses to their absolute maximum and for one of them, it ran out of ghosts to give me so I felt like I had one of the fastest times. That feeling was so great

[thequagiestsire]

I really like Celeste speedrunning due to the fact that it doesn’t lock the advanced techniques (wavedashing, dashjumping from a block, etc.) away until the endgame. You have them from the beginning, they’re just kept secret until the end, but if you know of them already for a speed run, or if you just like to mess around with physics, then you can use them to speed up certain parts a lot.

[Switchell]

Neon White does such a perfect job of slowly easing you into speedrunning. It's the first time in a game I've felt not overwhelmed digging into the more subtle and nuanced techs that are necessary to perfect your run. I don't really consider myself a speedrunner, and yet I keep playing to push myself to go faster and faster, and I've managed to get pretty high on the leaderboards.

[Fallkener]

For skipping cutscenes, make option in settings(or easy to access option) that skips all cutscenes automatically(in other words, dont play cutscenes at all). No need for holding the button for both regular player and speedrunner.

[azuarc]

One of the first games I think of when I think of designing for speedrunners is A Hat in Time. In addition to some menu features that are available if you toggle them, there is one area where there used to be a very technical, very difficult skip that could advance past an entire area very quickly. When the developers saw this glitch, rather than making it impossible, they codified it by making it so if you simply walked into the space the speedrunners were using, you'd skip the area just like the glitch. First-time players still wouldn't know it was there because the spot is visibly occluded and not somewhere a player would naturally think to go in most cases, but anyone aware of it can easily and effortlessly bypass that very slow (and also very scary) area.

[leolitz]

I would add one thing as a speedrunner (and also I'm happy you showed marble it up! That game has some really tough skips), it's not a rule to be followed 100%, but many devs, when thinking about speedruns, make very linear games thinking that the best thing is to make it so the runner has to worry about nothing but pure execution, well those kind of games become stale fast (unless some glitches or unintended things are found), speedrunning is also a puzzle where you want to find what works best, which levels to play to unlock the next world, which upgrades to get to make the rest of the game faster, it's all about trying to weight many factors and it can be pretty fun, and a game like this will often see some speedrunning revolutions.

Oh yeah and copy mario games where the set of movements is not incredibly big, you have like 4 actions, but by chaining them toghether you can get so many different results.

[stardf]

The thing with RNG and speedrunning is, games with lots of randomness can actually be very popular with speedrunners. Just look at how many "randomizers" are done at GDQ. High-RNG games can be a fun test of adapting to what the RNG gives you in order to get the best time you can. They can also have a sort of addictive "gambling" feel of hoping that the next run will be THE RUN with god-tier RNG. And they are very popular for live races, especially if you can make sure all players have the same "seed" so that each player's randomized output is as close to the same as possible.

I think where RNG gets annoying is when only a small part of the run relies on it, and the rest is much more reliant on execution. Then, it can feel like you're executing everything perfectly and get screwed over because of bad RNG. At least in an RNG-heavy game, your expectations are adjusted to account for randomness and so losing a run to RNG feels more "normalized".

[TheWrathAbove]

I'd also like to add that offering incentives to engage with speedrunning your game can be a good way to entice the player to at least give it a try. Mario Kart 8's Gold Wheels are inconsequential enough to never feel like a required unlock, but they do a good job at encourging players that would otherwise never even touch Time Trials to give it a try. Metroid Zero Mission's different end screens based on completion % and time likewise encourage the player to optmize their route on repeat playthoughs without ever feeling like the game is forcing you to speedrun to get the full experince.

[averageytviewer]

An important thing to remember is that you should make a game with being GOOD first in mind. Being speedrun friendly is cool and all, but if the game isn't any good, then who's gonna run it?

[log]

For me, Katana ZERO did a really good job of being speedrun friendly. It has a standalone speedrun mode on the main menu that automatically skips all cutscenes and replays, making it so easy to just sit down once and beat your own record.

[IrfanFakhrianto]

neon white is such a goated game
yes, the story and dialogue too

[HeeminGaminStation]

your opening line "I love speedruns, well WATCHING speedruns" made me realize I do not, but I watch and love every SummoningSalt and RWhiteGoose. Riddle me that.

[woopyforthewoop]

One of my favorite speedrun friendly games is Katana Zero, there's so many options, like cutting out all the cutscenes in the game, including extra content you would get from specific choices you do, and a whole ton of other things

[thijmstickman]

13:43 One thing you didn't mention is something I saw in CyberHook, a country wide leaderboard. I live in a smaller country, so I always tried to get at least top 5 and sometimes first. It was really rewarding and didn't require tons of time. Games with a bigger player count can do even many smaller geographic divisions sothat you have the feeling that your beating real people who you could actually meet on the street

[marvin_n]

I'm not a speedrunner, but Neon White makes me feel like one. Sometimes during my first playthrough I would get stuck on one level for 10+ minutes not because I couldn't beat it, but because I wanted to beat my personal highscore or get higher on the leaderboard.
Yesterday, I finally completed White's Hell Rush, and it brought me so much joy. Now gotta grind to complete Mikey's Hell Rush, because it changes so much, you have to come up with new strats and play differently having all the cards swapped for rocket launchers

[TgProd]

Titanfall 2 is my favorite speedrun. It has a lot of skill based fast movement. It also has skips and tricks, but it's not an out of bounds fest.
It has one autoscroller section and the cutscenes are not skippable. But then again, it's really intense. When I'm practicing, I use a mod that skips them, but for serious runs, I actually like and need the breather I get from cutscenes.

[Aluminum]

Something else about Celeste’s tutorial is that you can skip the dash tutorial via the skip cutscene button.

[NitrogenDev]

This really makes you think how some games were obviously designed with speed-running in mind and not as an afterthought!
One point I do not quite agree with is RNG. Sure, common elements are needed in each run, but I think in certain games (e.g., Spelunky, Dead Cells, or even Minecraft, in increasing order of RNG) that is precisely the aspect that makes them interesting to speed-run (and friendly). Though, indeed, not all games can make use of it. A good game that nails this balance I'd say perfectly is Peggle. While the layout of each level is the same, the orange and green pegs change positions and the purple ones are random every shot. This way, you know what to expect, but the game can still be brutal with awkward placements of key pegs.
At any rate, great video (and love letter to Neon White)!

[AdamTheGameBoy]

Alternately, use this video to come up with ways to troll speedrunners. Have random length fades in and out. Have unskippable animations, make your game an RPG, have your mandatory tutorial ask if you want to repeat the tutorial and have yes highlighted by default and there be a low chance for yes to be automatically selected again each frame. Have a random 1 frame to 10 second buffer between the credits and end screen. Tie progression to talking to an NPC that only randomly let's you proceed. Have forced online sections be necessary to complete the game. Make everything a gacha. Allow enemies to confuse/paralyze the whole party and keep them locked in that state.

[ModBros]

I think that RNG can be good for speedruns as well as bad. If it's a tiny detail that's make-or-break for speedruns, that's quite annoying. But if it's a core part of the game, runners are already prepared to accept the RNG, and it can really make the strategies more interesting. For example, games like Pikmin 2 and Minecraft have very active speedrun communities with very interesting tech and strategies, because every run is different