15 ms·

I thought I made a hard game and then speedrunners destroyed it

448 points by artsandsci 7y ago

dv_dt 7y ago
Now think of any critical software as the game, with security hackers as the speedrunners.
- eof 7y ago
  And then think of the fact that people are going to pay money to have software interfacing directly with their brains/neurons.
raverbashing 7y ago
Based on some speed runners videos I saw they have way more patience and ability in Super Mario than me But remember it doesn't matter if they finish it quickly if your audience is the average player A game that's too difficult is not fun for a lot of people. So unless your target audience is specialized in that, I wouldn't worry too much
noobermin 7y ago
One of the things I bemoan is that game developers have embraced speedrun-type players in that it has influenced their game design which is evident in the most recent games: almost every game that is sold as a "hardcore" game involves essentially the ability to memorize and perform, skills which are okay but I don't particularly really enjoy. I painfully miss twitch games like quake that instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately, you instead had to react and improvise quickly and think on your feet.[0] It's a different set of skills that seems to have fallen out of favor as of late. [0] To be clear, I'm talking about multiplayer as it's unpredictable.
- alexrage 7y ago
  Despite the press of the young player-base, Fortnite fills what you describe for me. The building mechanic creates so much opportunity for think-fast, improvise, and outsmart your opponent moments. Plus, playing solo means you don't have to interact with anyone if you don't want to.
  - Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
    > The building mechanic creates so much opportunity for think-fast, improvise, and outsmart your opponent moments. Yeah, I try to snipe someone, and they respond by building a 5-star hotel with WiFi.
    - timje1 7y ago
      Apex Legends is good for improvisational gameplay that doesn't involve memorising building patterns. Also it's free! The tactical opportunities in a fight that are available to a team with a gibraltar and pathfinder vs a gibraltar and pathfinder.. huge. Where does the shield go? Is claiming the high ground worth exposing yourself to the airstrike?
- mmanfrin 7y ago
  > I painfully miss twitch games like quake that instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately, you instead had to react and improvise quickly and think on your feet.[0] It's a different set of skills that seems to have fallen out of favor as of late. What? Two of the top four~ most played games on earth right now are battle royales.
  - Jach 7y ago
    Battle royales aren't arena shooters like Quake.
    - Mirioron 7y ago
      But they very much are games that require thinking on your feet.
      - pixelrevision 7y ago
        Hiding can be a good strategy too :p
    - ihuman 7y ago
      Battle Royals make you react and improvise quickly and think on your feet, instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately.
- everyone 7y ago
  "react and improvise quickly and think on your feet" You might like my game. Bomberman meets RTS. https://youtu.be/Zr0A8VcBnYk https://youtu.be/Zr0A8VcBnYk
- frou_dh 7y ago
  There was a fairly fundamental aspect of having to practice engine exploits in the Quake games: strafe-jumping. https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Bunny_Hopping https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Bunny_Hopping If you just moved around using the obvious controls then you would generally get destroyed by opponents who had mastered that unintuitive way to move fast.
- asark 7y ago
  The couple times I've achieved "good enough to consistently piss people off" abilities in FPS games, it's mostly been through knowing levels very well, to include patterns of movement. Probably there's another level above that once you're in "pro" tier where improvisation becomes a big deal again, but "very good for an amateur" status is mostly memorization, in my experience. I've seen the same thing in people I know who can pwn me at things like COD. It's 95+% knowing where to look and where to have your gun pointed no matter which part of the map you're on, so you can shoot before the pure-reflexes n00b even knows you're there.
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    In TF2 this is where as a pyro I started firing flares at fully cloaked spies (who are inaudible and invisible) and they would burst into flame and become visible, because I’d learned to predict their positions and timings to a degree that exceeded their variability. Something something “know your enemy” applies, even when you have no ‘current’ information at all.
    - Bokanovsky 7y ago
      I loved playing TF2 as a pyro. I used a similar technique of running around randomly jetting flames in certain places to find cloaked spies, but also flaming team-mates (as the flames wouldn't hurt them) to reveal spies in disguise.
  - ericmcer 7y ago
    Yeh in MOBAs it is totally this. Less reacting in 150ms to a visual queue. More I have been in this situation 100 times and expect character X to do Y right now. That’s why there is a whole psychology around moving in unpredictable manners at a certain level. Similar to the whole master swordsman fearing a novice more than another master.
    - hevi_jos 7y ago
      What makes you a master is the ability to predict everything before it happens fast and automatically. A master swordman does not fear novices precisely because they know their movements before they do. They look at (imperceptible for amateurs) body language hints and know exactly what you are going to do before you do it. In reality there are physics constraints. Before you do a movement, you need to put weight in some part of the body, tense a muscle....e.g it is impossible to jump without a specific movement of going down and preloading. Not only that , they know exactly what is the best response to it to neutralize whatever comes to them.
- dkarl 7y ago
  I think it's always been like that in any game with predesigned layouts and enemy placement. I was still a kid (in the 1980s) when I figured out I was playing a fundamentally different game from the kids who really loved video games. I was thinking, "I need to get faster at making decisions and timing my actions so I can respond to what's on the next screen," and they were thinking, "Okay, the next screen has two goblins closing from the upper right corner and one goblin closing from the middle and a fireball from top to bottom after four seconds, and the exit door starts closed and opens or closes every three seconds, so I'll kill the closest goblin while I wait for the fireball and then hit the exit the third time it opens...." I remember feeling guilty when I remembered what was on the next screen, because it felt like cheating. It kind of broke my heart when I realized that was the best way to get good and it was pointlessly stubborn for me to resist a technique that games were designed to cater to.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    I think you learned the wrong lesson. You shouldn't spoil your own fun because a bunch of savants can't see the forest for the trees. The secret of gaming is that the objective isn't to get the highest score / lowest time, it's to have fun playing. wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - Jach 7y ago
    It's not just games, it's life. But to take a non-video game, e.g. in hockey the better goalies aren't better because they have awesome reflexes or quick thinking, but primarily because they're better at predicting where the puck is going to be and positioning themselves accordingly. Same thing with gamers knowing "what's ahead", or "what's ahead with probability". Very few things are so random that "more accurately predicting the future" isn't the dominating strategy, with execution of the moment, while important, not being the primary factor.
    - 7y ago
- ufo 7y ago
  I suspect that you might enjoy games with procedurally-generated levels, like the various roguelike games out there. Have you ever played Spelunky?
  - IggleSniggle 7y ago
    I highly agree with Spelunky as a recommendation based on initiating comment.
- bscphil 7y ago
  I think you're on to something that bothers me a little too. Games like Celeste are certainly playable as an ordinary gamer who doesn't want to practice and memorize precise inputs, but it's a popular game to speedrun because the collision detection in the game is complete trash. You can jump straight through some obstacles, get additional dashes, etc. that the developers didn't originally intend. There's something un-fun to me that is hard to explain about all this. I don't like spending hours retrying a single challenge when I know there's a super precise series of inputs elite players or a TAS could use to get through in 5 seconds. I realize that's a very subjective thing and this is still fun to some players. I've moved to playing mostly puzzle games like The Witness, puzzle platformers like Braid, and challenging "simple" platformers like VVVVVV. What I like about VVVVVV is that the inputs are incredibly easy to learn. You will die a lot, and there are people who can make it through the whole game in deathless mode, but I'm okay with that because it just means I need to get better at the game, not get better at memorizing a precise series of inputs and strategies.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    It's seems odd to be bothered by knowing someone out there is tremendously better at a game than you are. Whenever I play tennis, I'm aware that my skills are laughably bad compared to even a mediocre pro, but who cares?
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      The greatest women's tennis player in the world happily earns millions of dollars despite intentionally not play thousands of people who would utterly defeat her in a match. In fact the whole pro league is set up to support that.
      - X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
        Seems unrelated.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Why does the existence of speedrunners playing differently ruin the fun for you? Why sabotage yourself by setting unfun time limit challenges for yourself? I will never be a chess grandmaster. That doesn't make chess unfun.
- ars 7y ago
  > involves essentially the ability to memorize and perform I call those "do over games", because you have to just do them over and over and over in order to win. I don't find them fun.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  You'd probably like DUSK, which is on sale right now on Steam (not that it was outrageously priced to begin with) and looks and feels like a classic twitch FPS (the devs also have another game called Amid Evil, which seems to do away with the 90's FPS aesthetic and go with a more magical setting, but otherwise keeps the same sort of gameplay). I haven't tried DUSK's multiplayer yet, but the singleplayer modes are great.
- on_and_off 7y ago
  I don't know .. often different people or different skill levels will solve hard games differently. I love Hollow Knight to bits. It is one of these "hard but fair" games. My first playthrough 1 year or 2 ago has seen me die a lot of times. And it was indeed because I needed to learn how each boss (there are so many of them .. maybe 30 or 40 ?? ) moves and react accordingly. I quickly started to see it as a dance or a dialogue with the boss though. You have a limited but versatile skill set at your disposal, so for each boss, I had to think about how to adequately counter a move. The end result is a beautiful dance of action and counter reactions. I had a second play through a couple of months ago. Since then, the devs have made the game change A LOT. Some bosses had their entire move set rewritten. New areas were added, etc. So I was not playing on memory. I had still acquired a wealth of knowledge on how to control that little bug, even with its limited initial toolset. So I beat most of the game without dying just by reacting quickly to whatever it threw at me, it was an awesome experience.
  - noobermin 7y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I'm not all jazz and no classical music. I love Hollow Knight actually, it's easily to me one of the best games I've played in years. I do admit it depends, I do tend to lean more on the jazz parts of my brain, even with games like Hollow Knight, especially during boss battles.
- opportune 7y ago
  I play a lot of Paradox games these days and they are exactly the opposite of games meant to be speedrun. They are meant to be played at exactly your own pace and are much more skill (strategy) based than memorizing specific sequences of actions. I think what you say is probably true of most platformers and other games like Sekiro (a successor to dark souls which was one of the original non-platformer games like this) but definitely not all games.
  - ricree 7y ago
    > I play a lot of Paradox games these days and they are exactly the opposite of games meant to be speedrun. They are meant to be played at exactly your own pace and are much more skill (strategy) based than memorizing specific sequences of actions. It depends on the exact context and goal. To an extent, I would consider "map painting" the equivalent of a speedrun. It's usually measured in elapsed game time rather than play time, but there's a similar effect. Especially with some of the more difficult OPMs, there can certainly be an element of memorization and optimizing starts. This falls off as the game goes further, but it definitely can be present. I recall some years back reading an EU3 byzantine guide that described many of the nations as being every bit as much puzzle game as strategy, where figuring out the tricks and traps of the opening years can mean the difference between a thriving growth and early defeat. Not that anyone ever has to play the games that way, but that's true of everything that gets put through a traditional speedrun as well.
    - opportune 7y ago
      I guess I don't consider it the same, unless we are considering speedrunning == mastery. I really appreciate those games for the sense of mastery you can get while also playing at your own pace. You don't need to memorize things like how to start as a difficult OPM once you have enough experience in the game, unless you need full optimality.
- cwkoss 7y ago
  I would suspect that it is harder to train reaction time than 'memorization' type skills. If this is the case, and gamers tend to gravitate towards games they are good at/getting better at, we would expect there is a lower demand capacity for reaction games than memorization games, because a smaller proportion of the population is capable of 'playing well'.
- pvg 7y ago
  that instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately What recent games are you thinking of? Competitive Quake players knew the maps down to the pixel, along with the location and respawn times of every resource. Lots of modern 'hardcore' platformers have randomization and don't depend on pure memorization.
cabaalis 7y ago
> This is a funny little story about what happens when your game gets discovered by speedrunners. The game was built with a timer which counts up. It's intended to be speedrun...
- Cyberdog 7y ago
  Yeah, I believe zero percent that this developer was unfamiliar with the concept of speedrunning while developing a game like this.
syberiyxx 7y ago
I'm pleased you're reacting to this with curiosity instead of rage.
scarejunba 7y ago
Haha, this is amazing! It must have been so much fun to have people enjoy it like that.
ibatindev 7y ago
I had to buy it to try it myself. Awesome work I have to say.
petercooper 7y ago
The terms "tear it to pieces", "ripped it to shreds", "destroyed" seem so emotive. It seems like these people loved the game enough to try and beat it in creative new ways and that seems really awesome. Minecraft thrived on similar hackery in the early days too.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > so emotive We may only be hearing about this story because this kind of language increased its chance of being shared. [I don’t think the developer resented the speed runners. He sounded flattered and amazed to me. But it’s sometimes hard to judge tone of voice from just text.]
  - auto 7y ago
    Yeah, it’s a cool blurb and a neat game, but this whole post is indie gaming advertising 101.
    - jonny_eh 7y ago
      The lack of funding for traditional marketing is one of the greatest challenge for an indie developer. If they can come up with a (legal) way for getting attention, all the more power to them.
      - Zhyl 7y ago
        This is fine for this guy, but not repeatable. When it's one guy its a fun story - a performance piece almost. When it's repeated, staged or even just fabricated then you have the beginnings of a new form of clickbait.
      - auto 7y ago
        Definitely not knocking it, I've been in and out of the indie dev scene for quite a few years now, just calling a spade a spade is all.
        7y ago
rsync 7y ago
Looks like someone should have budgeted for "Speedrunning as a Service" before launching ...
dmortin 7y ago
I'm not familiar with the scene. Are the speedrunners mostly kids with lots of free time? This hobby must be time consuming. Or are there also hardcore older gamers among them, who started playing in the 80s, 90s and they have jobs, families and still spend their free time spedrunning games?
- copperx 7y ago
  I thought speedrunners were fuzzing games somehow. Are you saying they play the game manually?
  - TacticalTable 7y ago
    Speedrunning is primarily done manually. Some players use fuzzers for discovering tech, but TAS is a separate genre of speedrun and generally more of a novelty than anything.
  - eridius 7y ago
    Speedrunners are playing the game manually, and sharing the tricks they find for how to exploit game mechanics to speed things up. There exist something called TAS (tool-assisted speedrun) where you use an emulator with save states and either slow motion or the ability to advance frame-by-frame in order to construct the "ideal" run, but runs constructed these ways generally aren't actually playable by hand because they rely too much on frame-exact timing.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - pdw 7y ago
    Yes, speedruns are humans playing the game live. If preprogrammed inputs or whatever are used, the term TAS (tool-assisted speedrun) is used. Calling a TAS a speedrun would be a faux pas.
  - jon-wood 7y ago
    There’s different varieties of speed running. Some people do it entirely manually, others do Tool Assisted Speedruns (often abbreviated to TAS) where a program provides all the input, allowing frame perfect moves which humans are incapable of. There’s also a slowly growing trend of letting machine learning algorithms loose on games like Mario - that stuff to my knowledge is still at the stage of trying to get an AI to even be able to finish the game at all, but I’m sure with some time and effort we’ll start seeing techniques no one has even thought to try.
AaronFriel 7y ago
I'm guessing based on the overlay that this was a tool assisted speedrun (TAS)? If so, I wouldn't fret if I were the author. These players are able to exploit collision glitches and timings that are almost impossible for a human player! And if not, all the more impressive.
- CraftThatBlock 7y ago
  Overlays are quite common on non-TAS speedruns too, it seemed they were real-time
- tyrust 7y ago
  The overlay does not imply a TAS. Other players are just interested in the inputs required to perform certain actions.
Ajedi32 7y ago
My favorite game to watch speed runs of is still Getting Over It. The game is notoriously frustrating, with many players spending multiple painstaking hours climbing up small sections of the level, only to make a critical mistake, fall back down, and have to start all over again. Then you have people like this, who've gotten so good at the game that they're able to beat the entire thing in 1 minute 17 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnzTObVRwF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnzTObVRwF0
- falcolas 7y ago
  My current favorite (to watch) is Celeste. The humans are amazing, but the TAS is just out of this world. It just looks so damned cool as it blows through the levels.
- bluetidepro 7y ago
  So true. And for people to understand just how hard it is, on the flip side, I LOVE Dunkey's reaction video playing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qGCleYV4cw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qGCleYV4cw hahah It's absolutely hilarious to watch.
darepublic 7y ago
This post seems like a humble brag tbh
__david__ 7y ago
People will speed run anything! I run a little solitaire site that has leaderboards and the Frecell games are dominated by faster than 10 second completion times. People complained in the forums about the times and how they must be by cheaters, and then the fast people started posting videos of themselves beating the games in seconds. They're truly impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRX-kxiNfes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRX-kxiNfes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSgdcH8JJI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSgdcH8JJI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgm3BoVxrMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgm3BoVxrMI
- cabaalis 7y ago
  I dated a girl in college ca. 2003 because we connected when she showed me she could "speedrun" freecell on my PDA. Not like these videos, but not far off either. Just thought I'd share that.
- phreeza 7y ago
  How does this work, are the people able to really solve the game this fast or are they memorizing sequences? Is it possible to see the game before the click starts?
  - dwd 7y ago
    Memorising sequences is not the right way to look at it - it's simply a result of practice (or playing it too much): More like muscle memory where you see and act without consciously thinking about it. Watch speed solving Rubik's cubes to see how they do it on an instinctive level. With Freecell, once you know what you're doing you know at a glance what your options are: how deep a stack you can move and which cards are key to clearing out and in which order. As well as playing way too much Freecell back in the 90s I played Minesweeper to death. Probably a better example of how you can progress from needing to consciously work out where you could safely click, to knowing at a glance, to being able to click the one cell that would open up the area. If you were actually flagging bombs you were going too slow.
binarysolo 7y ago
Great ad - engaging, entertaining content that doubles up as exposure for the product. The best kind of ad that is actually useful. (This post is appreciating it, not knocking it for that.)
csours 7y ago
This is reminiscent of N, Way of the Ninja [0] I used to work nights doing production support (lots of downtime). To beat 88-4 [1], I exported the level, re-edited it to have 4 starting points (each a quarter of the way through [0/4, 1/4, 2/4, 3/4]). Then I practiced each of those in turn until I could beat them. After I could be each with about an 80% success rate, I tried the whole level again. There are probably only 5 hard "gates" in 88-4. That is, 5 places where you are likely to fail (say a 15% success rate before extensive practice). The success rate after 5 gates is unexpectedly, phenomenally low: 0.008% (0.15^5). If you practice and get your individual success rate up to 80%, then the overall challenge is a doable 32.7% overall. I think my success rate was more like 40% on three gates, though, because even after practicing I think I tried about 30 times. I still think about gates like this. I think Yatzee explained this in a Zero Punctuation episode, but I don't remember which one. 0. http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/ http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/ 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6hxHi234AM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6hxHi234AM
- dnate 7y ago
  have you played the sequel n++? I think it's a worthy successor with an amazing soundtrack. (if you are into electronic music that is)
  - csours 7y ago
    I have, some (I mainly bought it as a reward for the time I spent on the original; same for Spelunky and Cave Story+) Nowhere near as much as the original. I think the time I spent on the original was a function of boredom.
kazinator 7y ago
I thought I made a safe, correct, program; then QA destroyed it! Waaah!
dlevine 7y ago
Even if some people can beat it in 1 minute, it is still extremely hard for a lot of people, and provides a lot of enjoyment. And those speedrunners who beat it in a minute probably spent dozens of hours finding those exploits. A couple of years ago, I played Hollow Knight on PC. I probably spent 60 hours getting to the final ending and finding the majority of the secrets. I enjoyed it immensely for a month or two. Sure there are speed runners who can beat it in under an hour, but that doesn't diminish the many hours of enjoyment I got from it. If you haven't, I would recommend watching Summoning Salt's World Record Progression videos, each of which takes a game and talks about the series of exploits that allowed the world record speedruns to exist.
fiatjaf 7y ago
When I was young I played video games like they were an open world full of mysteries I was uncovering by myself, as the first and only explorer. Then I realized all the little things I was discovering were actually known by everybody else. Specially, they were made by someone else. As I grew old I kept thinking about how to make a game that would have secrets no one knew, not even the game maker. But that's impossible, not even Dwarf Fortress or similar very complex games where you can do basically almost anything are like that. Every game is just a treasure hunt made by some adult for kids to play -- and that is very depressing.
- seabird 7y ago
  Speedruns and other exploitative/unintended aspects of a game basically solve that issue. There is no way that the developers of Super Mario World would have ever guessed that someone would beat the game in minutes by reprogramming it at runtime via glitches. The same goes for "0.5 A presses" and other absurd ways to play games.
Havoc 7y ago
The fact that speed runners even bothered is a huge vote of confidence
franknine 7y ago
For people who like this post, I highly recommend "Devs Play" S1E06 - Psychonauts "The SMK Speedrun" by Double Fine Production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsDc1YVxHA0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsDc1YVxHA0 They had a speedrunner running their game in front of the development team which is hilarious.

448 points by artsandsci 7y ago

dv_dt 7y ago

Now think of any critical software as the game, with security hackers as the speedrunners.

eof 7y ago
And then think of the fact that people are going to pay money to have software interfacing directly with their brains/neurons.

raverbashing 7y ago

Based on some speed runners videos I saw they have way more patience and ability in Super Mario than me But remember it doesn't matter if they finish it quickly if your audience is the average player A game that's too difficult is not fun for a lot of people. So unless your target audience is specialized in that, I wouldn't worry too much

noobermin 7y ago

One of the things I bemoan is that game developers have embraced speedrun-type players in that it has influenced their game design which is evident in the most recent games: almost every game that is sold as a "hardcore" game involves essentially the ability to memorize and perform, skills which are okay but I don't particularly really enjoy. I painfully miss twitch games like quake that instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately, you instead had to react and improvise quickly and think on your feet.[0] It's a different set of skills that seems to have fallen out of favor as of late. [0] To be clear, I'm talking about multiplayer as it's unpredictable.

alexrage 7y ago
Despite the press of the young player-base, Fortnite fills what you describe for me. The building mechanic creates so much opportunity for think-fast, improvise, and outsmart your opponent moments. Plus, playing solo means you don't have to interact with anyone if you don't want to.
- Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
  > The building mechanic creates so much opportunity for think-fast, improvise, and outsmart your opponent moments. Yeah, I try to snipe someone, and they respond by building a 5-star hotel with WiFi.
  - timje1 7y ago
    Apex Legends is good for improvisational gameplay that doesn't involve memorising building patterns. Also it's free! The tactical opportunities in a fight that are available to a team with a gibraltar and pathfinder vs a gibraltar and pathfinder.. huge. Where does the shield go? Is claiming the high ground worth exposing yourself to the airstrike?
mmanfrin 7y ago
> I painfully miss twitch games like quake that instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately, you instead had to react and improvise quickly and think on your feet.[0] It's a different set of skills that seems to have fallen out of favor as of late. What? Two of the top four~ most played games on earth right now are battle royales.
- Jach 7y ago
  Battle royales aren't arena shooters like Quake.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    But they very much are games that require thinking on your feet.
    - pixelrevision 7y ago
      Hiding can be a good strategy too :p
  - ihuman 7y ago
    Battle Royals make you react and improvise quickly and think on your feet, instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately.
everyone 7y ago
"react and improvise quickly and think on your feet" You might like my game. Bomberman meets RTS. https://youtu.be/Zr0A8VcBnYk https://youtu.be/Zr0A8VcBnYk
frou_dh 7y ago
There was a fairly fundamental aspect of having to practice engine exploits in the Quake games: strafe-jumping. https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Bunny_Hopping https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Bunny_Hopping If you just moved around using the obvious controls then you would generally get destroyed by opponents who had mastered that unintuitive way to move fast.
asark 7y ago
The couple times I've achieved "good enough to consistently piss people off" abilities in FPS games, it's mostly been through knowing levels very well, to include patterns of movement. Probably there's another level above that once you're in "pro" tier where improvisation becomes a big deal again, but "very good for an amateur" status is mostly memorization, in my experience. I've seen the same thing in people I know who can pwn me at things like COD. It's 95+% knowing where to look and where to have your gun pointed no matter which part of the map you're on, so you can shoot before the pure-reflexes n00b even knows you're there.
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  In TF2 this is where as a pyro I started firing flares at fully cloaked spies (who are inaudible and invisible) and they would burst into flame and become visible, because I’d learned to predict their positions and timings to a degree that exceeded their variability. Something something “know your enemy” applies, even when you have no ‘current’ information at all.
  - Bokanovsky 7y ago
    I loved playing TF2 as a pyro. I used a similar technique of running around randomly jetting flames in certain places to find cloaked spies, but also flaming team-mates (as the flames wouldn't hurt them) to reveal spies in disguise.
- ericmcer 7y ago
  Yeh in MOBAs it is totally this. Less reacting in 150ms to a visual queue. More I have been in this situation 100 times and expect character X to do Y right now. That’s why there is a whole psychology around moving in unpredictable manners at a certain level. Similar to the whole master swordsman fearing a novice more than another master.
  - hevi_jos 7y ago
    What makes you a master is the ability to predict everything before it happens fast and automatically. A master swordman does not fear novices precisely because they know their movements before they do. They look at (imperceptible for amateurs) body language hints and know exactly what you are going to do before you do it. In reality there are physics constraints. Before you do a movement, you need to put weight in some part of the body, tense a muscle....e.g it is impossible to jump without a specific movement of going down and preloading. Not only that , they know exactly what is the best response to it to neutralize whatever comes to them.
dkarl 7y ago
I think it's always been like that in any game with predesigned layouts and enemy placement. I was still a kid (in the 1980s) when I figured out I was playing a fundamentally different game from the kids who really loved video games. I was thinking, "I need to get faster at making decisions and timing my actions so I can respond to what's on the next screen," and they were thinking, "Okay, the next screen has two goblins closing from the upper right corner and one goblin closing from the middle and a fireball from top to bottom after four seconds, and the exit door starts closed and opens or closes every three seconds, so I'll kill the closest goblin while I wait for the fireball and then hit the exit the third time it opens...." I remember feeling guilty when I remembered what was on the next screen, because it felt like cheating. It kind of broke my heart when I realized that was the best way to get good and it was pointlessly stubborn for me to resist a technique that games were designed to cater to.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  I think you learned the wrong lesson. You shouldn't spoil your own fun because a bunch of savants can't see the forest for the trees. The secret of gaming is that the objective isn't to get the highest score / lowest time, it's to have fun playing. wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Jach 7y ago
  It's not just games, it's life. But to take a non-video game, e.g. in hockey the better goalies aren't better because they have awesome reflexes or quick thinking, but primarily because they're better at predicting where the puck is going to be and positioning themselves accordingly. Same thing with gamers knowing "what's ahead", or "what's ahead with probability". Very few things are so random that "more accurately predicting the future" isn't the dominating strategy, with execution of the moment, while important, not being the primary factor.
  - 7y ago
ufo 7y ago
I suspect that you might enjoy games with procedurally-generated levels, like the various roguelike games out there. Have you ever played Spelunky?
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  I highly agree with Spelunky as a recommendation based on initiating comment.
bscphil 7y ago
I think you're on to something that bothers me a little too. Games like Celeste are certainly playable as an ordinary gamer who doesn't want to practice and memorize precise inputs, but it's a popular game to speedrun because the collision detection in the game is complete trash. You can jump straight through some obstacles, get additional dashes, etc. that the developers didn't originally intend. There's something un-fun to me that is hard to explain about all this. I don't like spending hours retrying a single challenge when I know there's a super precise series of inputs elite players or a TAS could use to get through in 5 seconds. I realize that's a very subjective thing and this is still fun to some players. I've moved to playing mostly puzzle games like The Witness, puzzle platformers like Braid, and challenging "simple" platformers like VVVVVV. What I like about VVVVVV is that the inputs are incredibly easy to learn. You will die a lot, and there are people who can make it through the whole game in deathless mode, but I'm okay with that because it just means I need to get better at the game, not get better at memorizing a precise series of inputs and strategies.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  It's seems odd to be bothered by knowing someone out there is tremendously better at a game than you are. Whenever I play tennis, I'm aware that my skills are laughably bad compared to even a mediocre pro, but who cares?
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    The greatest women's tennis player in the world happily earns millions of dollars despite intentionally not play thousands of people who would utterly defeat her in a match. In fact the whole pro league is set up to support that.
    - X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
      Seems unrelated.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Why does the existence of speedrunners playing differently ruin the fun for you? Why sabotage yourself by setting unfun time limit challenges for yourself? I will never be a chess grandmaster. That doesn't make chess unfun.
ars 7y ago
> involves essentially the ability to memorize and perform I call those "do over games", because you have to just do them over and over and over in order to win. I don't find them fun.
yellowapple 7y ago
You'd probably like DUSK, which is on sale right now on Steam (not that it was outrageously priced to begin with) and looks and feels like a classic twitch FPS (the devs also have another game called Amid Evil, which seems to do away with the 90's FPS aesthetic and go with a more magical setting, but otherwise keeps the same sort of gameplay). I haven't tried DUSK's multiplayer yet, but the singleplayer modes are great.
on_and_off 7y ago
I don't know .. often different people or different skill levels will solve hard games differently. I love Hollow Knight to bits. It is one of these "hard but fair" games. My first playthrough 1 year or 2 ago has seen me die a lot of times. And it was indeed because I needed to learn how each boss (there are so many of them .. maybe 30 or 40 ?? ) moves and react accordingly. I quickly started to see it as a dance or a dialogue with the boss though. You have a limited but versatile skill set at your disposal, so for each boss, I had to think about how to adequately counter a move. The end result is a beautiful dance of action and counter reactions. I had a second play through a couple of months ago. Since then, the devs have made the game change A LOT. Some bosses had their entire move set rewritten. New areas were added, etc. So I was not playing on memory. I had still acquired a wealth of knowledge on how to control that little bug, even with its limited initial toolset. So I beat most of the game without dying just by reacting quickly to whatever it threw at me, it was an awesome experience.
- noobermin 7y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I'm not all jazz and no classical music. I love Hollow Knight actually, it's easily to me one of the best games I've played in years. I do admit it depends, I do tend to lean more on the jazz parts of my brain, even with games like Hollow Knight, especially during boss battles.
opportune 7y ago
I play a lot of Paradox games these days and they are exactly the opposite of games meant to be speedrun. They are meant to be played at exactly your own pace and are much more skill (strategy) based than memorizing specific sequences of actions. I think what you say is probably true of most platformers and other games like Sekiro (a successor to dark souls which was one of the original non-platformer games like this) but definitely not all games.
- ricree 7y ago
  > I play a lot of Paradox games these days and they are exactly the opposite of games meant to be speedrun. They are meant to be played at exactly your own pace and are much more skill (strategy) based than memorizing specific sequences of actions. It depends on the exact context and goal. To an extent, I would consider "map painting" the equivalent of a speedrun. It's usually measured in elapsed game time rather than play time, but there's a similar effect. Especially with some of the more difficult OPMs, there can certainly be an element of memorization and optimizing starts. This falls off as the game goes further, but it definitely can be present. I recall some years back reading an EU3 byzantine guide that described many of the nations as being every bit as much puzzle game as strategy, where figuring out the tricks and traps of the opening years can mean the difference between a thriving growth and early defeat. Not that anyone ever has to play the games that way, but that's true of everything that gets put through a traditional speedrun as well.
  - opportune 7y ago
    I guess I don't consider it the same, unless we are considering speedrunning == mastery. I really appreciate those games for the sense of mastery you can get while also playing at your own pace. You don't need to memorize things like how to start as a difficult OPM once you have enough experience in the game, unless you need full optimality.
cwkoss 7y ago
I would suspect that it is harder to train reaction time than 'memorization' type skills. If this is the case, and gamers tend to gravitate towards games they are good at/getting better at, we would expect there is a lower demand capacity for reaction games than memorization games, because a smaller proportion of the population is capable of 'playing well'.
pvg 7y ago
that instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately What recent games are you thinking of? Competitive Quake players knew the maps down to the pixel, along with the location and respawn times of every resource. Lots of modern 'hardcore' platformers have randomization and don't depend on pure memorization.

cabaalis 7y ago

> This is a funny little story about what happens when your game gets discovered by speedrunners. The game was built with a timer which counts up. It's intended to be speedrun...

Cyberdog 7y ago
Yeah, I believe zero percent that this developer was unfamiliar with the concept of speedrunning while developing a game like this.

syberiyxx 7y ago

I'm pleased you're reacting to this with curiosity instead of rage.

scarejunba 7y ago

Haha, this is amazing! It must have been so much fun to have people enjoy it like that.

ibatindev 7y ago

I had to buy it to try it myself. Awesome work I have to say.

petercooper 7y ago

The terms "tear it to pieces", "ripped it to shreds", "destroyed" seem so emotive. It seems like these people loved the game enough to try and beat it in creative new ways and that seems really awesome. Minecraft thrived on similar hackery in the early days too.

jacobolus 7y ago
> so emotive We may only be hearing about this story because this kind of language increased its chance of being shared. [I don’t think the developer resented the speed runners. He sounded flattered and amazed to me. But it’s sometimes hard to judge tone of voice from just text.]
- auto 7y ago
  Yeah, it’s a cool blurb and a neat game, but this whole post is indie gaming advertising 101.
  - jonny_eh 7y ago
    The lack of funding for traditional marketing is one of the greatest challenge for an indie developer. If they can come up with a (legal) way for getting attention, all the more power to them.
    - Zhyl 7y ago
      This is fine for this guy, but not repeatable. When it's one guy its a fun story - a performance piece almost. When it's repeated, staged or even just fabricated then you have the beginnings of a new form of clickbait.
    - auto 7y ago
      Definitely not knocking it, I've been in and out of the indie dev scene for quite a few years now, just calling a spade a spade is all.
      - 7y ago

rsync 7y ago

Looks like someone should have budgeted for "Speedrunning as a Service" before launching ...

dmortin 7y ago

I'm not familiar with the scene. Are the speedrunners mostly kids with lots of free time? This hobby must be time consuming. Or are there also hardcore older gamers among them, who started playing in the 80s, 90s and they have jobs, families and still spend their free time spedrunning games?

copperx 7y ago
I thought speedrunners were fuzzing games somehow. Are you saying they play the game manually?
- TacticalTable 7y ago
  Speedrunning is primarily done manually. Some players use fuzzers for discovering tech, but TAS is a separate genre of speedrun and generally more of a novelty than anything.
- eridius 7y ago
  Speedrunners are playing the game manually, and sharing the tricks they find for how to exploit game mechanics to speed things up. There exist something called TAS (tool-assisted speedrun) where you use an emulator with save states and either slow motion or the ability to advance frame-by-frame in order to construct the "ideal" run, but runs constructed these ways generally aren't actually playable by hand because they rely too much on frame-exact timing.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pdw 7y ago
  Yes, speedruns are humans playing the game live. If preprogrammed inputs or whatever are used, the term TAS (tool-assisted speedrun) is used. Calling a TAS a speedrun would be a faux pas.
- jon-wood 7y ago
  There’s different varieties of speed running. Some people do it entirely manually, others do Tool Assisted Speedruns (often abbreviated to TAS) where a program provides all the input, allowing frame perfect moves which humans are incapable of. There’s also a slowly growing trend of letting machine learning algorithms loose on games like Mario - that stuff to my knowledge is still at the stage of trying to get an AI to even be able to finish the game at all, but I’m sure with some time and effort we’ll start seeing techniques no one has even thought to try.

AaronFriel 7y ago

I'm guessing based on the overlay that this was a tool assisted speedrun (TAS)? If so, I wouldn't fret if I were the author. These players are able to exploit collision glitches and timings that are almost impossible for a human player! And if not, all the more impressive.

CraftThatBlock 7y ago
Overlays are quite common on non-TAS speedruns too, it seemed they were real-time
tyrust 7y ago
The overlay does not imply a TAS. Other players are just interested in the inputs required to perform certain actions.

Ajedi32 7y ago

My favorite game to watch speed runs of is still Getting Over It. The game is notoriously frustrating, with many players spending multiple painstaking hours climbing up small sections of the level, only to make a critical mistake, fall back down, and have to start all over again. Then you have people like this, who've gotten so good at the game that they're able to beat the entire thing in 1 minute 17 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnzTObVRwF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnzTObVRwF0

falcolas 7y ago
My current favorite (to watch) is Celeste. The humans are amazing, but the TAS is just out of this world. It just looks so damned cool as it blows through the levels.
bluetidepro 7y ago
So true. And for people to understand just how hard it is, on the flip side, I LOVE Dunkey's reaction video playing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qGCleYV4cw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qGCleYV4cw hahah It's absolutely hilarious to watch.

darepublic 7y ago

This post seems like a humble brag tbh

__david__ 7y ago

People will speed run anything! I run a little solitaire site that has leaderboards and the Frecell games are dominated by faster than 10 second completion times. People complained in the forums about the times and how they must be by cheaters, and then the fast people started posting videos of themselves beating the games in seconds. They're truly impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRX-kxiNfes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRX-kxiNfes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSgdcH8JJI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSgdcH8JJI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgm3BoVxrMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgm3BoVxrMI

cabaalis 7y ago
I dated a girl in college ca. 2003 because we connected when she showed me she could "speedrun" freecell on my PDA. Not like these videos, but not far off either. Just thought I'd share that.
phreeza 7y ago
How does this work, are the people able to really solve the game this fast or are they memorizing sequences? Is it possible to see the game before the click starts?
- dwd 7y ago
  Memorising sequences is not the right way to look at it - it's simply a result of practice (or playing it too much): More like muscle memory where you see and act without consciously thinking about it. Watch speed solving Rubik's cubes to see how they do it on an instinctive level. With Freecell, once you know what you're doing you know at a glance what your options are: how deep a stack you can move and which cards are key to clearing out and in which order. As well as playing way too much Freecell back in the 90s I played Minesweeper to death. Probably a better example of how you can progress from needing to consciously work out where you could safely click, to knowing at a glance, to being able to click the one cell that would open up the area. If you were actually flagging bombs you were going too slow.

binarysolo 7y ago

Great ad - engaging, entertaining content that doubles up as exposure for the product. The best kind of ad that is actually useful. (This post is appreciating it, not knocking it for that.)

csours 7y ago

This is reminiscent of N, Way of the Ninja [0] I used to work nights doing production support (lots of downtime). To beat 88-4 [1], I exported the level, re-edited it to have 4 starting points (each a quarter of the way through [0/4, 1/4, 2/4, 3/4]). Then I practiced each of those in turn until I could beat them. After I could be each with about an 80% success rate, I tried the whole level again. There are probably only 5 hard "gates" in 88-4. That is, 5 places where you are likely to fail (say a 15% success rate before extensive practice). The success rate after 5 gates is unexpectedly, phenomenally low: 0.008% (0.15^5). If you practice and get your individual success rate up to 80%, then the overall challenge is a doable 32.7% overall. I think my success rate was more like 40% on three gates, though, because even after practicing I think I tried about 30 times. I still think about gates like this. I think Yatzee explained this in a Zero Punctuation episode, but I don't remember which one. 0. http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/ http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/ 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6hxHi234AM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6hxHi234AM

dnate 7y ago
have you played the sequel n++? I think it's a worthy successor with an amazing soundtrack. (if you are into electronic music that is)
- csours 7y ago
  I have, some (I mainly bought it as a reward for the time I spent on the original; same for Spelunky and Cave Story+) Nowhere near as much as the original. I think the time I spent on the original was a function of boredom.

kazinator 7y ago

I thought I made a safe, correct, program; then QA destroyed it! Waaah!

dlevine 7y ago

Even if some people can beat it in 1 minute, it is still extremely hard for a lot of people, and provides a lot of enjoyment. And those speedrunners who beat it in a minute probably spent dozens of hours finding those exploits. A couple of years ago, I played Hollow Knight on PC. I probably spent 60 hours getting to the final ending and finding the majority of the secrets. I enjoyed it immensely for a month or two. Sure there are speed runners who can beat it in under an hour, but that doesn't diminish the many hours of enjoyment I got from it. If you haven't, I would recommend watching Summoning Salt's World Record Progression videos, each of which takes a game and talks about the series of exploits that allowed the world record speedruns to exist.

fiatjaf 7y ago

When I was young I played video games like they were an open world full of mysteries I was uncovering by myself, as the first and only explorer. Then I realized all the little things I was discovering were actually known by everybody else. Specially, they were made by someone else. As I grew old I kept thinking about how to make a game that would have secrets no one knew, not even the game maker. But that's impossible, not even Dwarf Fortress or similar very complex games where you can do basically almost anything are like that. Every game is just a treasure hunt made by some adult for kids to play -- and that is very depressing.

seabird 7y ago
Speedruns and other exploitative/unintended aspects of a game basically solve that issue. There is no way that the developers of Super Mario World would have ever guessed that someone would beat the game in minutes by reprogramming it at runtime via glitches. The same goes for "0.5 A presses" and other absurd ways to play games.

Havoc 7y ago

The fact that speed runners even bothered is a huge vote of confidence

franknine 7y ago

For people who like this post, I highly recommend "Devs Play" S1E06 - Psychonauts "The SMK Speedrun" by Double Fine Production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsDc1YVxHA0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsDc1YVxHA0 They had a speedrunner running their game in front of the development team which is hilarious.