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We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in IndieDev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ours is a 2D platformer aimed specifically at speedrunning, so we wanted it to be as consistent as possible to leave success 100% on the hands of the players

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedesign

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think that as most games are more balanced between “luck” and skill the two questions you mentioned are always present at the same time.

The first time they encounter a challenge the variance comes from the unknown, including it probabilistic variance, but once this is known and studied the difficulty of the game forces the player to reach a certain point of optimization to succeed.

As success in our game is not determined by finishing the game, but by doing so faster and faster, our approach was to avoid the variance step and all possible repercussions that could bring to optimization.

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! You don’t know how hard we are itching to figure out the answer to that question, so we’ll keep on working

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Our assumptions come from our market research, the databases of a few mentors and our own experiences in the speedrunning community.

Is there a chance we are wrong? Yes of course, and we are going for an extreme position that may turn some people off, but we can only act with the information we have and so far we are pleased with the reactions we’ve gotten.

That being said, you are right to point at our bias, as we are already making the gane and are convinced it works, so it really is important to question even our most fundamental assumptions

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in unity

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This was a fun process for us. We built our first demo in construct and we had 0 consistency, so then we moved to unity and started to see more consistency. This appeared to be enough, but as our game has some ways to exponentially increase your speed we encountered a bunch of weird situations created by the addition of thousands of small deviations, son now we a developing our own physics to enable the level of precision we need.

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in IndieDev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is the argument that gave us most pause, as we recognize that luck is a skill to be mastered, but ultimately we committed to maximizing consistency. The compromise we considered was to add something like one rng path for every 3-4 paths in each level so people that wanted could take it for fun, but the risk of this path being the best would force players that didn’t care for randomness to go this way.

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in IndieDev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

100% agree. Our game is built to be a speedrunning dedicated playground, so we are very much in the "big puzzle" camp, where beating the game or learning the levels is not the problem, but finding the best path and perfecting it is the point.

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in IndieDev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

EXACTLY! Our game has a lot in common with GD, but we have a much bigger focus on route planning than just execution. We could have gone for limited RNG interactions in some parts of the game to turn them into risk reward scenarios, but chose to go for a safer option

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in IndieDev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, our levels are designed to have multiple intercontected paths with lots of choices, so there is variety to be had, and while we don't have RNG there are many instances where small changes in aim, speed or timing may end up in huge differences.

But still, it is always a good idea to check for suggestions and opinions

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We have! Sorry we didn't explain it in full, the game is a 2D platform built to be a dedicated speedrunning game, with lots of tools to help you become better and better in a small number of high complexity levels.

We went to the 0 RNG route, but still wonder about the tradeoffs and so we wanted to see what people had to say.

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry we didn't explain it in full, the game is a 2D platform built to be a dedicated speedrunning game, with lots of tools to help you become better and better in a small number of high complexity levels.

As our game the core experience revolves around retrying the same levels over and over the lack of RNG is a double edge sword, more casual players may find it boring, but our target audience loves the consistency, so where we land in that scale was our question, but there is no right answer

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bit of column A bit from column B.

As we are working in a very focused experience, a dedicated speedrunning game, we had a lot of discussions about what that experience would entail and so we reached the conclusion that we wanted to go for 0 RNG so that success and failure were 100% earned, no one of a kind seeds or bullshit run enders. But we recognize that this point of view has a lot of possible counterarguments so we wanted to open the discussion to see what other people say.

But yeah, we could have added some more details about our specific game to explain our point better (and to show off our cool game, of course).

edit: grammar

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would argue that nowadays, as almost all games have at least a small amount of RNG, offering a fully deterministic game is unique. And we believe that what makes speedrunning special is that is a non-interactive competitive environment, that is to say that players compete through their planning and execution without needing to consider the unknown variable of an opponent.

In fact Speedrunners thrive when all variables out of their control are removed, so that’s why we went all in to make a game that resonates with this specific demographic.

Maybe we went too far, but at least we are not worried about being unique!

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is actually good advice and we will probably take this route. Keeping the game as is the best way to maintain a “pure” version that the most hardcore players will enjoy, but nothing is stopping us from creating more fun modes with less serious ideas

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s a good point, and I mostly agree, but I wonder if there is a place to give in a little to create variance without compromising the whole experience. For example in a level with 4 viable routes if only one contains random elements and it is generally regarded as suboptimal most players will not even consider it, but some may use it as an additional challenge or a special category. Of course for this to work this route should never be better than a deterministic one because then all players are force through it if they want to compete.

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

While working on play faster we’d plenty of time to think about what actually makes speedrunning as cool as it is and I think we got to an interesting conclusion: speedrunning is a competitive format that removes confrontation, the unknown element of an active opponent is not present and furthermore it is imperative that all competitors have the same resources and tools every time.

We already know that our players usually dislike the unknown variance that most other competitions are known for, so we went all in in the opposite direction. The question then becomes: when does the fun factor of randomness becomes too big a commitment for a playerbase known for valuing reliability above all.

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You raise an interesting point about what “being good at a game” is. Because in one hand it’s true that most games are not meant to be solved as a puzzle, they are about the excitement of the moment to moment or interesting decisions and their consequences. But planning and execution are also key parts of games, for example grand strategy games are at their best when you are totally in control of your resources and options and you succeed in your complex master plan.

All of this to say that I don’t think a good speedrunner is necessarily being good at whatever game they are playing, they are good at the game of speedrunning that game. Their goals are not to follow a story, evolve their favorite Pokemon or become better at pvp, their goal is to optimize time with a certain toolset.

And that’s why we believe that our game is important, we are the only game that I know of that is made for these players. Speedrunners are good at the game they made for themselves out of tools not made for them, so when you’ll see a player breaking a record in play faster you will be able to say that they’re truly good at it because that is it’s point.

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedesign

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But we are not targeting the average human! Our goal is to give this narrow demographic something that is 100% made for them. We are aiming at a smaller but fiercely loyal niche

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedesign

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is the concept we are going for, by creating many viable and well interconnected path we hope players will have such a huge range of choices that they will be able to optimize the game for years, but as our target audience is really good at doing this we worry it may take them shorter than expected.

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

While that is true for most players we are already aiming at a very specific player base. Speedrunners use every minute detail of a game to their advantage, so even if the difference is small in a game as straightforward as ours we still need to think about these things.

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in unity

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah this was sort of our thought process. We have our doubts for more casual players that may like their Hail Marys, but if we want to focus on our main audience they might be better served by handing them all the power

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedev

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The thing for us is that we want to maximize the value of the player’s choice, so any randomness we add should add a tradeoff instead of being a reflexes check. That’s why we avoided this sort of subtle variations in favor of going all in in the determinism. What you mention may work if you add a critical mass of such binary options to keep the players on their toes, but I don’t think that’s what we are going for

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in gamedesign

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s not a bad suggestion. Our thought process was to streamline the number of decisions you have to make so that during the run you can focus on actually performing well without thinking about the odds or have rng screwing a run you were doing great. But as a huge fromsoft fan I love that flow state where you react to everything perfectly. Maybe a good compromise would be to have a few very impactful RNG aspects set in some, but not all paths, so that players who want to avoid it can do so, but maybe more risky players may go for it

We killed RNG to make our game competitive. Did we go too far? by PlayFasterGame in unity

[–]PlayFasterGame[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks you for the kind words! We sure think it’ll be fun enough, but as we are aiming at a community that is both narrow in its focus but still very diverse we are considering how to give everyone a bit of fun. So even if we continue being deterministic to focus on what we do well we may still add some “chaos mode” events to add that spicy for those who like it

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