Here's the quick and dirty: Dreadout is a fun game with a lot of personality. Despite that, not a lot of people run this game. It doesn't help that the starting community didn't flesh out the rules very well (myself included in that, even though I came in a year later it was the first game I moderated).

Two years later, veteran speedrunner Starwin came along and proposed some changes to help gain attention for the game, and this is a thread to collect his ideas and flesh them out in their own thread.

Changes already made:

• 100% categories now under Misc.
• Removed "full game" from existing category titles.

Proposed ideas/changes (aka "To Do List"):

1. Determine if category changes are necessary. -- It was known for a while that there are actually THREE endings (two good, one bad), and it was later discovered there's a set trigger to decide which good ending the player gets (which is whether Ira's neck is snapped or not). This has led to complications with existing categories and start/stop times. -- Starwin suggested categories for Bad/Good/True endings. I'm also in favor of this.

2. Determine a concrete timing for stop/start times. -- Current timing rules is that the timer starts upon save name confirmation and ends at the start of the credits.

3. Rewrite rules to remove confusion from new runners.

4. Retime/recategorize existing runs after any category changes.

I should note here that I'm not the sole person to decide what is changed, but rather the person who will implement and enforce them. My role here is to do what the community wants.

Personally, I'm excited. I know Starwin's reputation as a runner (and from the fighting game community) and I'm looking forward to seeing what other parts of the game get broken wide open. I can probably check with a few other horror game runners I know or follow and see if they'd be interested running in the game. I'm half inclined to buy them a copy if they don't have it already.

Anywho, let's get to discussing. I'll also look into reaching out to previous runners and see if we can get their input.

Really looking forward to see where this game goes after we have a solid rule set.

Thanks for getting this set in motion Duckie!

I was thinking about something in bed earlier. If we do differentiate between Good and True endings, I'd like to require proof of ending. There's two ways of verifying the ending that I know of:

1. The obvious one would be checking to see if Ira gets her neck snapped or not, as this is the trigger between the good/true endings.
2. The ending itself. IIRC the true ending is slightly longer, but the biggest difference is that Linda is listening to a voicemail from Ira and there's a quick scene that shows that Linda had been listening to the voicemail about 2000 times. Even if the stop timer is changed to when the player loses control of Linda, it'd be really beneficial to moderators to show enough of the ending in the run to show that the intended ending was gotten.

Just make a rule that your run needs to show the ending in full.

Trying to teach someone about speedrunning this game rekindled my interest in it, and I realized the ruleset is REALLY confusing.

So I added the following to clarify:

"Timer starts when profile name is confirmed and ends at the end of the post-credits scene."

I also added Vynnada as a moderator, as she's expressed interest in running the game.

One of my to-do items is to create three categories for the game, Bad/Good/True and recategorize runs as needed.

Okay, so imagine my surprise when I went to go re-verify the runs to separate True and Good runs and I was the only one who had a True ending. The rest were now classified as Good (Ira Dies).

Anyone want a free WR, go derust and beat my time. Just make sure Ira lives for the True ending!