Hello, I'm making a game with an eye towards speedrunning, and I have a few questions for people who are into speedrunnning as I'm designing the save system and time-attack mode.

The game has a Story Mode and a Time Attack Mode, and it is a 2D side-scrolling platformer style game.

• Would you want the best time to update regardless of whether a level was beaten in Story Mode or Time Attack Mode? That is, if a level was beaten in Story Mode faster than the best time in Time Attack mode, should the best time shown be updated in the Time Attack Mode?

• How important is it for the game to track best time in Time Attack mode with collectibles as well as without? That is, each level has collectibles, would you prefer the Time Attack Mode track both fastest completion time Any% as well as fastest completion time 100% for the level? I'm trying to decide if that's worth the extra effort to track and display and save.

What's the difference between Story Mode and Time Attack Mode, exactly? If it's just that Time Attack Mode has an in-game timer, consider simply making that an option for people to use in the Story Mode. Similarly, if the mode disables cutscenes or something like that, you could simply make cutscene skipping an option in the story mode, which would be beneficial to all players and not just speedrunners. Making a whole separate mode for speedrunning is a nice idea, but tends to just be an unnecessary complication.

For the second question, speedrunners are perfectly capable of tracking their personal bests in multiple categories outside of the game, so unless you have a game design reason to track both in-game I wouldn't worry about it.

In general, the best way to make a game good for speedrunners is to simply make a good game with lots of replay value. Adding features specifically for speedrunning isn't inherently a bad thing, but your main focus should just be on making the game itself good for the 99% of your players that are not speedrunners.

Thanks so much for the reply, that gives me some good food for thought. After reading your comment and reflecting on it, the time attack mode does have a lot of redundancy, and for now I may cut it. I could always add it back in if it makes sense or gets requested. I had originally thought it might contain some extra levels, display a developer time to beat for all levels, and possibly more, but it may just be bloat, which I can certainly do without.