Once you have beaten a Mario course, once you have grabbed every coin, defeated every enemy, and found every secret, the only thing left to do is go fast. Speedrunning video games is more mainstream and popular than ever. With the advent of twitch.tv, speedrunners have become popular, their practices sessions gather communities, and their records are reported as news. Our focus this week in the Mario Maker Workshop is to learn how to design courses that function are great levels while supporting excellent speedrunning experiences.
"When you look at videos of super players who are very good Super Mario Bros. players, they tend to run all the way through the course without ever stopping" — Miyamoto
Things to Keep In Mind
Speedrunning a level is still playing the level. Whether a player is going for a world record or just trying to up the tempo, all these possibilities are a subset of the levels total emergent potential. Speedrunnings will do anything to save time, even if it means skipping the level entirely. As designers, it's our job to create to balance all emergent possibilities. Speed running a level, in general, should force players to engage with the level and its unique elements, not ignore them.
Good levels often make good speedrun experiences. I can't think of a bad game or a bad level that has a really interesting speedrun outside of using glitches. If the game is fun, it should also be fun to go through it quickly. It should be fun to use the skills you build up to take your play to the next level.
Speedrunning isn't always a more challenging experience than regular play. Typically for a Mario course, getting all the coins, defeating all the enemies, and finding all the secrets tests many more skills that just running and jumping to the end.
Speedrunning is competitive. Reaching the goal more quickly than the current record holder is typically the goal. Mario Maker 2 makes record chasing accessible. Every course keeps a record of who cleared it the fastest. And with these records, there's only room for the best player. Not even a top 3. Lowering your own course clear time or going for the world record turns just about any course into a highly replayable, high skill challenge.
...to be able to create something that’s simple and easy for anyone to play, but still has some of that challenge and skill that super players desire. — Miyamoto
Different Types of SpeedRun Designs
- Hold Forward / Run And Jump / Auto Runners: These courses feature the fastest path with no obstructions that would cause Mario to stop dashing or stop holding forward. Players only have to figure out when and where to jump and they reach the goal at the same time.
- Multiple paths are equally viable but all are Hold Forwards (non-linear): With multiple paths, there is potential for players to cross from one to the other. When all the paths are all viable and straight forward (hold forwards), players have a more complex speedrunning experience that can be more lenient or twice as complex.
- Tricky maneuvers with soft penalties: While attempting to save time, a course can present challenges that have multiple ways to overcome it. Often times one way is faster than the other. When players go for the faster strategy and mess up, they may lose a very small amount of time. For longer runs, level challenges like this allow players to "mess up" and keep going for a solid finish.
- Tricky maneuvers with hard penalties: Some maneuvers are essential for getting a competitive time in a course. When these maneuvers have hard penalties (e.g. death or only one attempt allowed), players are practically forced to restart when they mess up. One way soft penalties can turn into hard penalties is when a level features universal timers or gates. If the player makes too many small mistakes and misses their chance to get through a passage at the right time, they may have to wait until the cycle repeats. And waiting that long may be unacceptable.
- Optimization opportunities everywhere: Some maneuvers in Mario allow the player to make tiny optimizations. A slope, for example, lets players slide forward faster than they can run. Any time there's a slope in the viable path, players can optimize their run by sliding or running on the slope as long as possible. When fighting for hundredths of a second, everything matters. The first official Ninja challenge featured slopes which needed to be optimized to get sub 20 seconds.
- Dynamic consequences based on execution: This category goes beyond soft and hard penalties. Mario is a game that features many dynamic elements that can each have their own chain of interplay. Even with a deterministic set up, small differences in execution can have dramatic effects. Also, random elements are a less controlled way of creating dynamic variation.
- Complex non-linear playspace: When a course goal requires omnidirectional pathing and contains many viable ways to mix and match paths or connect paths, pathing becomes magnitudes more complex. When these paths have a variety of challenges with a range of soft and hard penalties, finding your way to a fast time may be harder than actually executing it. 3D platformers like Banjo-Kazooie or Mario Odyssey feature this kind of speedrunning challenge.
Gotta Go Fast — Sonic