Hey all, my names James,

I’ve been solo making a parkour game (called Freerunners) in my spare time for the last few years. I wanted to try to capture the feeling of getting your timing right, finding a good rhythm and flow as you are moving. I always thought this kind of matches up with speedrunning quite well.

I’ve watched a bit of speedrunning stuff over the years and when I was a kid I used to speedrun Zelda Ocarina of Time before I knew speedrunning was a thing, but honestly I’m very nooby knowledge-wise about it all.

I wanted to get peoples opinions on a couple of things:

• Do they think my game is something people would be interested in speedrunning?
• If so is there anything I should or could add to help make speedrunners lives easier?

I haven't finished the game yet but I’ve got a Free Demo up on Steam of the beginning levels -> https://store.steampowered.com/app/1430330/Freerunners/ . I’d love to hear what you think, honest feedback about the game and thoughts on speedrunning potential, if you have time to try it out! (best with a controller if you have one)

Here is a video of one of the demo levels so you can get an idea of the gameplay:

I don't have much to add about this specific game (no shade, just not my cup of tea personally), but I can speak broadly to this question:

is there anything I should or could add to help make speedrunners lives easier?

In general most of your development effort should stay focused on making the game itself good. It's tempting to go out of your way to appeal to speedrunners, but they're ultimately they're going to represent a very, very small percentage of your overall audience (realistically less than 1%), so keep that in mind when determining your priorities. Also, games very often become good speedgames through the sheer willpower of people who already really like the game trying to get the most out of it, so really the best way to make a good speedgame is to simply make a good game that people want to keep playing (easier said than done, I know, but you know what I mean).

That said, absolutely any quality of life improvements you can cook up to increase the replay value of the game will dramatically improve the speedrunning experience, while not exclusively benefitting speedrunners. Obvious things like being able to skip cutscenes/dialog, and reducing any other unnecessary downtime, to more complex things like tightening up the controls, and increasing the skill ceiling so people still have something interesting to do on their 3rd, 4th, 5th playthroughs, etc, all go a long way.