Thread by @joshez_

Another GDQ, another opportunity for me to remind devs that the way you support speedrunning for you game is NOT to add teleporters or shortcuts or workarounds but to add optional timers and skippable cutscenes

Teleporters, shortcuts, and workarounds are actually typically antithetical to interesting and fun speedruns.

If someone wanted not to play your game, they just wouldn't. The whole point of a speedrun is to engage with what's there.

This is a harsh lesson that @fullbright (among other people) had to learn. Gone Home had a secret that allowed people to jump straight to the end of the game, purportedly to support speedrunning.

The result of this was that runs were 46 seconds and people quickly stopped caring.

@fullbright The 100% route is way more interesting because it required people to actually deal with what's there. Skips are cool and interesting but the reason people invent new categories is because skips _AREN'T_ the point

And I don't mean to single out Steve and the Gone Home team, but it is a very neat example of the disconnect between understanding of what motivates speedrunners from the outside and what actually motivates speedrunners.

If you want to add mechanics that encourage speedrunning, anything that has unpredictable consequence and emergent behavior is great

But the reality is that _EVERY_ game has mechanics with unpredictable consequence and emergent behavior.

You don't need to make a physics sandbox to have exploitable mechanics! Super Mario RPG is an all time classic speedgame for reasons that have almost nothing to do with physics interactions!

Hell, Pokemon is a really interesting speedgame! The main thing it struggles with is rng variance, but that same variance allows for extremely complex routing strategy.

Different games take to being speedrun differently, and every game CAN support runners!

Imagine if Pokemon built in quick reset? Allowed you to hit a button to skip text windows? Added more tools to see EVs and IVs quickly after catching?

What if you could see your timer live and manually program in split points? Compare to historical times on the same cart?

All of that would give way more to Pokemon speedrunners than like, a secret path that let them skip straight to the elite four or a hidden cache of rare candy that let you bypass stat management

My point is: If you want people to speedrun your game, there are always things you can do. It might be a difficult series of choices based on a lot of non-obvious research, but there is always something you can do.

Related: I'm available for consultation.

If you are genuinely interested in these kinds of considerations but don't think you have the background to make informed decisions, get in contact.