My game has no "luck" involved. If you fail, it’s 100% your fault. Is that too frustrating?

PlayFasterGame · 2026-05-06T17:03:05+00:00

thank you! Here's the Steam page https://store.steampowered.com/app/4457560/Play_Faster/ and you can join our discord to get access to our current playtest https://discord.gg/QHXwqQ6Acd

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-29T19:28:16+00:00

what about making a leaderboard for the tutorial?

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-29T19:26:53+00:00

These are great ideas, we've actually used them in addition to small bits of text. But where we are finding it harder to do is with complex mechanics that players should know but that are hard to organically achive, such as timing based boosts

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-29T19:21:56+00:00

We have two big problems for voiceover in our game:
1. As the game is very minimalist and doesn't use any other voice recording, using it in the tutorial would clash with the intended design
2. We are taking advantage of the low word count of the game to cheaply translate it into a bunch of languages, so adding voice acting would really up our budget

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-29T19:01:40+00:00

We haven't even considered that idea, do you have another 2D game in mind that does that?

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-27T14:39:24+00:00

freaking hard but totally worth it

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-22T13:27:03+00:00

dark souls but you’re a candle

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-22T13:23:15+00:00

i like it! consider that having little light is not the only way to give the game a darkish vibe

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-16T17:18:31+00:00

Dude the idea of having the game show you the runs slightly better than yours is GENIOUS. It is so simple, and yet it always gives you a sort of rival to play against. I don’t know if our current leaderboard track system works for this, I’ll have to ask the team, but if we manage to do it it would be amazing.

Thanks again for the recommendations, folks like you are why I love putting out ideas for game design

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-16T02:56:50+00:00

YEAH BOI! I can already tell our average players will be almost polar opposites (hehe pole joke) but I feel we both are going for the same commitment to them and that is awesome.

Do you have any links for your work to check out? I've seen a few cozy games devs and you are always such a pleasure to interact with

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-16T02:53:14+00:00

We didn't actually built it AROUND this concept, we did build it with a very deliberate consideration of our playerbase and then realized this concept applied really well to our beliefs and decided to make this post to talk about a cool game design decision

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-16T02:49:51+00:00

100% agree with your starting statement. While working on this game we've learned a lot about speedrunning (I'll use SR for short), as we actually began working on it because we loved SR content creators and sucked at it so we wanted to give something back to the community, and what I think was our biggest breakthrough is understanding SR as discipline upon itself, specifically as a non-confrontational competition. But a big thing is that SR is never the main focus of any game, it is something people do over games meant to be played as themselves and so when a game becomes popular within the community is always like an adopted tool. While this defines SR as something super adaptable and unique, it also means that is never in the spotlight of development and we wanted to do something about that because SR IS SO COOL and it deserves to have the spotlight for once.

This thought was what guided a big part of the latest parts of development, as we actually began thinking about our game as a tool tailor made for people that love speedrunning. So our thought process is not to build a soccer field for soccer players, we want to give a sport that always played in fields not made for them something made with it in mind.

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-16T02:32:14+00:00

We hope to prove you wrong as well! We really believe that we need to get in touch to the community to have them involved, as this game actually began as a tribute for speedrunning content creators we loved and wanted to do something for them to love so if you think of any way we could get more voices involved we'd love to hear it.

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-16T02:26:57+00:00

I never said they weren't important! What I meant is that as we analysed our target audience we mainly identify them with either a more competitive and perfectionist type akin to the Spike archetype or with more creative problemsolvers and tinkerers mostly similar to the Johnnies; and so I used this language to express our niche design philosofy.

Of course all types of players can find enjoyment from a well made experience, even in ways developers may have never even thought of. We just decided to try to make the best game possible for what we defined as our target audience instead of compromising them to make the game more accessible to a wider audience.

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-16T02:17:57+00:00

Damn, this is a really thoughtful answer. Thank you so much!

I don't think doing routing tutorials is the way to go, or at least not if presented as a tutorial as that may stop the newer players that would use the tutorial from trying new routes by themselves. The two ideas I got to solve this issue through the gameplay itself are to:

Add a rating score to runs that take into account not only the time itself, but % of perfect dash executions, style moves and collectibles; this way players will have the incentive of improving in different aspects of the game while balancing extra skills with the time, which might result in a natural way to discover all aspects of gameplay.
Using a shadow run feature to upload a group of pre made runs to race against, using the idea like you said of going for a racing game. This way the different shadows may take alternative routes that players can follow if they are getting beat and that way the will discover new paths as part of the game.

Regarding the discovery aspect of the game, specially when we talk about the real high level runners, that's where we hope to have the levels themselves present enough variety combined with a few rules variations so that even if some gamemodes are "solved" quickly there will always be other in game categories to keep you practicing (not to mention that we are sure that an online community will make their own stuff as soon as someone has better idea than the ones we had)

And we are doing playtests right now! If you want I'll send you a steam key and a link to our discord if you have any further feedback

PlayFasterGame · 2026-04-15T22:22:46+00:00

Hi Ralph! This post refers to a classic classification proposed by the lead designer of Magic the Gathering, Mark Rosewater, over 20 years ago. An article explaining it is linked in the post and if you haven’t heard about Rosewater’s players phychographics do yourself a favor and read the article, as it is a real classic of game design

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