Seeing as there's a speedrunning community now for this game. I'd like to ask for some revisions to be made in the rules for added consistency and better form. These aren't major changes but should add for quality of life.
First, Any% should start not when New Game is pressed but rather, when Alex begins to be controllable (when the WASD/Arrow Keys show up to indicate so). Since Alex's future requires player input, the ending should be either when that dialogue is selected or when the screen goes to black before the title card. It should also be specified if Any% is being done on the first run or subsequent runs.
Second, in the spirit of Any% and the possibility of skips utilizing pause, it shouldn't be mentioned what goes on during paused time or what arbitrary amount of time is allowed to be paused or not. Paused time should always be included in the run (Whether or not load times should be is another matter entirely. Personally, I think they shouldn't to allow cross-platform records.)
Third, NG+ Any% should follow the same Start and End points as stated above and not just the Convenience Store scene. NG+ of Oxenfree contains a significant amount of added content of the game apart from the aforementioned scene. Thus, they can't be disincluded (unless a skip is employed).
I'll address the 2nd point first before going to the other ones, pausing was just me desperately needing the toilet, figuring that no one would ever run this game as it's been out for nearly 2 years and no one had ran it or created a leaderboard for it, it wouldn't matter too much, I'll run this again soon and change the rules about pausing so it's to always be included.
1st point is honestly just preference from game to game depending on the community, i.e. the Final Fantasy community starts on new game and ends on last input, sometimes after credits. The Life Is Strange community starts on first input and ends on last so unless an influx of runners come along asking for the startimg time to be changed, I don't see a reason to change it. Any% can only be ran on a fresh game file, I figured that was implied with NG+ existing but will change the rules to reflect this.
Speedrunning is about completing the game in the fastest possible time, bailing out the island at the convinience store brings up a credits scene which means you've "completed" the game. If someone wanted to run NG+ and not do this strat, I'd be happy to create a "NG+ (No Best Ending)" for it but as it stands, it is the fastest way of beating the game so that stands.
I personally like the concept of starting the timer when you hit "New Game", but I think that the moment to stop the timer shouldn't be when you do the input to take the last photo, because after that there is a dialog that Alex can do, so that's a part of the game, and that means that the time that dialog can take is a part of a run as well, in my opinion.
On that matter, I would like to vote to make the rule for that to be "timer stops when the screen goes black after the last photo", like TurtleByte suggested, but even on the last cutscene, you have to pick a dialog for Alex when she begins to talk about herself, so that counts as a part of the game as well.
So... overall, I think that the most accurate way to put it would be to stop the timer when the screen goes black after Alex watches the last photo. I would like to read your opinions about this :)
Also, I think that more clarity on the rules would be great! ("timer ends on photo" doesn't really say where exactly it should end).
Loved your run btw Chris ♥
Tad late to the party, why Shouldn't we not include load times to the final tally. Wouldn't that make a notable difference for anyone running on an SSD vs HDD?
I agree with @LgkLewd. I'm on Switch and the loading times are absolutely ruthless. That'd mean tho that all previous records would need to be readjusted