Hey again all!
I would like to take this time to inform everyone of future plans for category extensions.
As you all know, HOURS is a highly customizable experience; you get to pick one of 11 Hosts to take on the game in one of 4 difficulties, with 3 on/off run modifiers (those being, Overclock, Turbocharge, and Scramblefoe), with 2 types of timers (White and Teal), with any one of the current 22 tempos.
This roughly comes out to a possible 15,488 individual times that you could possibly achieve in HOURS, and with that, a need for a certain level of care for what we choose to let be its own place-based category.
On the other hand though, there are fair arguments to be held that some of those toggleable options should absolutely hold as their own categories. I've already taken the initiative to set some of these up by making the game's different timers and difficulties into individual binary sub-categories, meaning that for every major category, there are 4 different set-ups you can go for:
- OC/TC + White Timer
- OC/TC + Teal Timer
- No OC/TC + White Timer
- No OC/TC + Teal Timer
However, I recognize that these categories will eventually not be enough to capture the full intricacies and different challenges in running HOURS with other modifiers. For this reason, I have laid out a few trigger events that will result in future category extensions:
- Host Subcategories: When the top 20 leaderboard spots on the Any% White/Teal timer board are filled with the same combination of Host and Tempo.
- Difficulty Subcategories: When we reach ~40 active runners (viewable in Statistics.)
- Host/Secret-Grouped Tempo Subcategories: When we reach ~150 active runners (maybe after the Steam release...)
Aside from these future sub-categorizations, I do not think we'll be being any more specific than that. It's also probable that these aren't the exact numbers, nor how we'll specifically approach the problem of having so many configurations to speedrun in HOURS.
That's all for now. Submit some runs, folks! And if you do, make sure you read the darn rules first!
