Librarianon

Librarianon

@Librarianon

Your local Librarianon

  • He/Him

Writer, TF Finatic, Recohoster, and Game dev. Wasnt able to post here as much as I liked, but I'll miss it and all of yall. Till we meet again, friends!

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Librarianon
@Librarianon
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

i think GAMES MADE QUICK??? is over

we had a good run. there were like fourteen of them! and i participated in maybe three. honestly i don't even watch gdq any more and i'm kind of disillusioned with speedruns generally. so it's mostly become the thing i have to remember to set up real quick at the last minute between my birthday and strawberry jam

strawberry jam is still extremely good though so look forward to that. i might even set it up earlier this year! and oh boy i hope i will actually finish a game for my own game jam this year haha oh my god

it would be nice to run another kind of game jam that is not immediately adjacent to my month-long one, but it'll have to be something that is a little more personally relevant to me. not sure what that is yet

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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

wiggles
@wiggles

i’m curious what led to your disillusionment with speedrunning if you’re interested in talking about it. is it related to how runners talk about “broken games”? i’m always a little bit rankled by the way runners treat developers when i watch gdq

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

it's kind of a constellation of things around that yeah. weird glorification of bugs, weird adversarial framing vs developers. of course if the bugs get fixed then everyone will jump through hoops to play on 1.0 anyway because it's faster.

but also, i remember a specific gdq moment where a guy was lamenting that he had to go through some section because they hadn't figured out how to skip it yet, and that is when the magic faded all at once. he was complaining about having to play the video game. because the ideal speedrun, of course, is one that experiences as little of the game as possible. which seems very much at odds with enjoying the game. and this clicked with how e.g. portal speedruns have always been completely uninteresting to me, because it's just "watch us hop around in the void for 20 minutes and skip all the puzzles". but it's a puzzle game and i like it for the puzzles, so if you don't do the puzzles then why would i want to watch you play it?

and then in practice the actual act of speedrunning tends to be grinding out a route of nearly identical gameplay that someone else often came up with. which is cool and interesting for gdq once, because you're seeing all the tricks for the first time, but after a few years you've already seen half the event

meanwhile speedrunning has leaked pretty far into how people talk about video games, and i get this vague sense that it discourages people from even acknowledging that games ostensibly have rules. or like, multiple times i've publicly described a difficult bug in my own game in progress, like a maddening thing (that turned out to be beyond my control) where occasionally the player would stop colliding with the world, and i consistently got someone suggesting i leave it in because speedrunners will love it. as if i should deliberately let my game be worse because then it'll be entertaining to watch one of 5 people play as little of it as possible, over and over

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wiggles
@wiggles

thanks for the reply! that makes a lot of sense. i think if someone told me that i should keep bugs in my code for someone who is purposely using my code wrong my head would explode lol

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Tayruu
@Tayruu

I have absolutely dwelled before on keeping certain bugs in for speedrunning potential...
It's amusing in the moment but in the grand scheme of things it's like... n-no I don't want holes in my game...

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valpackett
@valpackett

imo the choice of games is key for it to be fun. for me gta san andreas is kinda the perfect speed game. there's no "like it for the puzzles" situation, the normal casual gameplay is actually kind of a fuckin slog. as little of the game as possible is still 3 hours (barring the meme category skip-to-credits that only works in the… wait for it… WINDOWS STORE port). there's no jumping in the void either, all the "major glitches" are related to duplicating missions which just never gets old and is always pleasant to watch. the routes are evolving to this day. etc.

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ketsuban
@ketsuban

meanwhile speedrunning has leaked pretty far into how people talk about video games

I remember watching a speedrun of NiGHTS Into Dreams. I'm sure they did a bunch of technical investigation into routing and how to attain maximum speed at all times and stuff but the end result is just so, so boring. NiGHTS is not a speed-oriented game, it wants you to rack up huge score multipliers and mess around with Nightopians and so on but all that is completely invisible to the modern games industry because almost nobody does score attack runs of a game anymore.

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ketsuban
@ketsuban

Although one thing I disagree with is the mindset I think is underpinning the use of phrases like "the ideal speedrun": what you say is true of any%, but 100% or glitchless categories are just as valid and generally involve a lot more of the intended gameplay experience.

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chaoticiak
@chaoticiak

in practice the actual act of speedrunning tends to be grinding out a route of nearly identical gameplay that someone else often came up with

this so much. i love figuring out the optimization, but that all is seen to be in the background, behind the scenes of the one actually doing it. personally i don't care for the actual runner; tell us who routed this thing, they're the amazing one.

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

yeah exactly. i'm super interested in how little bugs can lead to bizarre gameplay effects, but (a) that doesn't make them part of the game exactly, and (b) i'm much less interested in some guy going "yeah so jeff found this, i dunno how it works, but i did it twelve thousand times to get good at it" like i might as well be watching some guy run around a track while explaining that someone else figured out keeping to the inside is faster but he doesn't remember the details

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fluffy
@fluffy

I've been totally tuned out of GDQ for ages myself, for somewhat different reasons than you, but yeah the only reason I cared about GDQ is that it's when GMQ happened, and even then I only occasionally participated in that.

I'm not even sure when GDQ happens anymore, and I'm just expecting to see a flood of videos on my YouTube feed for me to mostly ignore.

Strawberry Jam is amazing though and it's one of the highlights of my year because it's when I end up writing a lot of great music for a bunch of fun, weird games.

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Strawberry-Fox
@Strawberry-Fox

I mostly avoid GDQ myself because I like playing old retro games and funnily enough I haven't had them all spoiled yet. There are also some newer games I haven't played yet and I'd like to find out stuff myself.

Also, while I know lots of speedruns skip large chunks of the game, They don't skip literally everything, so I might still have stuff like levels, bosses, items, mechanics, etc spoiled. Best for me to steer clear.

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