Ask a Game Dev

If I have a particular target audience in mind when designing a game whole cloth, I approach it by trying to identify the things that the target audience looks for specifically. I’d probably start with a list of features that speed runners look for and like, and then try to fit an overall core game loop around improvement and mastery of those features. So what kind of features do speed runners like?

When you peel back all of the layers, a speed run is really an optimization problem. The goal is to get to the end of the game as quickly as possible by taking the most efficient route that the players can collectively figure out. The fun comes from identifying and improving the various parts of the run to optimize them further. After thinking about it a little, these are what I think of as the core pillars of a good speed runner’s game:

Other smaller quality of life features that would also be good to include:

As you may have surmised, these pillars are fairly broad and can be applied to a pretty wide variety of game genres. The most important factor is realizing what it is that your target audience is looking for (e.g. interesting optimization problems with high execution potential) and making sure your game provides that kind of experience.

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Yes, many of us watch speed runs. AGDQ and similar events are very popular among game devs, especially designers. A good number of our discord members were commenting live during this past AGDQ and I saw many office workstation secondary monitors set to stream it in the background during work hours. Watching games get played at extremely high levels of execution is fun and interesting. Game devs are usually among the most invested 5% so we’re interested in this stuff - especially if we’ve worked on the project. As long as the speed runner doesn’t do something ignorant like calling the devs lazy, we’re usually pretty good with what they’re doing. I tend to get annoyed and tune out if the runner starts badmouthing the devs on stream.

We usually don’t specifically study speed runs - I’ve mentioned before that every game that ships has a list of bugs a mile and a half long that we never got around to fixing. In most cases (>90%), the skips and exploits the speed runners use are known issues that were found, reported, and deemed to be too low priority for the dev team to address. That should make sense if you think about it - the skips and exploits speed runners use won’t break or crash the game (or they wouldn’t be used in a speed run, which requires completing the game), and they’re pretty hard to use right. This automatically makes them less important than any bug that does crash/break the game or any certification issue. If the exploits are obscure and difficult to set up, it’s probably an even lower priority for us to fix.

This isn’t to say that we necessarily understand exactly when specific exploits can be used for skipping ahead under very specific circumstances. We just know that we found them and chose not to fix them. That’s what I feel whenever I see somebody playing one of the games I worked on and exploiting bugs to get ahead - “Oh I never knew you could use that bug to skip this part of the game”. We usually know about the bug but not necessarily the full range of its application.

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