What's your primary focus in speedrunning?

[BigBoy91]

I have a tendency to gravitate towards smaller, more linear maps with little room for error and a somewhat heavy reliance on RNG. I've been getting a little burned out lately, and it's been making me think about switching my focus to maxing out longer, more challenging maps. I've been playing Struggle - Antaresian Legacy and it's so much different than the maps I'd usually pursue. What's your thought process behind choosing what you want to run?

[Maribo]

Probably 80% of things I run fall into the following categories:
- Pacifist run where you just go to the exit.

- Pacifist run with fucked route (difficult AVJ, very infight heavy, etc)

- Max run for difficult map (subjective interpretation)
- Max run for a map with good flow (again, subjective interpretation)

- Nightmare run with something like a consistent wake-up AVJ opportunity

 

I've been trying to dabble more in episode and d2all max runs, they've been refreshing experiences. I think almost all of my submissions for them have been loosely casual table fills, rather than rigorous grinding of an optimal route, but it's pretty satisfying to nail the exit at all.

[4shockblast]

I've had a lot of different random things drive me over the years, a lot of it is just random shit, but stuff I've done includes:

• A run for at least one WAD starting with every letter and number.
• A bit of the idgames exploration thread, definitely want to get back to that someday.
• General WAD tablefilling (Sunlust pacifist, 64KB vanilla pacifist, etc.). The most of this was definitely Perdition's Gate, that was quite a huge project. :D
• High-level optimization like Scythe nomo.

A lot of what I've done is just random shit too, though, like if I see a new trick or a run someone posts (or streams) that I want to do. :^) Really, I feel like I've tried to dabble in as many different kinds of runs as possible, different categories, styles, etc., including TAS and now co-op, heh.

 

These days I feel like doing random runs is a lot less rewarding because of that since it feels like more of the usual, so most of what I aim for is either to participate in various demo events since the community aspect of it makes it feel more exciting or continuing some of the long-standing projects that remain on my todo list, which is basically just finishing up the runs I want to do for any WADs/maps I've "committed" too (mainly Scythe nomo, perdgate, thissuxx, H2H-XMas, but also Sunlust 32, etc.). Often I still get distracted too, but I try to avoid sinking too much time into distractions that don't feel like something new, unless of course, it's shitfuck.wad.

 

Besides the above, one random goal that has been in my mind as of late is 500 unique recorded WADs on DSDA, since I'm only about 90 WADs away. I think the most anyone has ever run from what I checked in the past is DidierTranber at 470ish IIRC, so that would place me above anyone else in this stat, so that would be cool. :D

[Decay]

Tic-beating and/or spite runs.

 

Mostly I like proof of concept runs. It's been a while since I did that though, I felt like I needed to prove myself as a competent runner so I started trying to beat runs instead of table filling. I ended up getting to a place I feel comfortable with, so I'll probably go back to doing that. Primarily pacifist because shooting demons is incredibly boring to me. Stroller if I feel it.

[GarrettChan]

3 minutes ago, Decay said:

Tic-beating and/or spite runs.

Or just take record indices from me >:(

 

For me, mostly short maxes (under 5 min), and sometimes I do go out of my comfort zone to try out some longer maxes. Honestly... I do think maxes are not very enjoyable in many aspects, but I guess it does cover up my weakness of movement a bit, heh.

[kvothesixstring]

As if there was any question.

GlidgeBusiness.

[aconfusedhuman]

idk I just play doom 🙂

[Kinetic]

maxes of: hard maps, long episode/d2all runs of hard maps, table fill maxes of hard maps. Combat puzzle/slaughter maxes.

 

I try to avoid doing actual speedruns where rng is needed to get an optimal time :\

Edited July 7, 2022 by KineticBeverage

[Lucky_Edie]

This map is cool, I'm going to beat it. 

 

[ChestedArmor]

To have fun

[BigBoy91]

On 7/7/2022 at 1:43 AM, ChestedArmor said:

To have fun

Pfffft...

[Gosu_Noob]

Is there an AVJ?

 

Is the run short?

Is the run heavily RNG dependent?

 

Am I having fun?

Will I be having fun in 10,000 attempts?

[Dan87]

Demo recording for me is effectively just an extension of how I played the game casually. I discovered pwads & slaughter maps around 5-6 years ago with okuplok (using extreme save scumming) and was instantly hooked. Over time I was midsaving less and less, eventually getting to the point where I wouldn't midsave at all. From there it wasn't much of a leap to start trying actual demos.

So I more or less record the kinds of maps that I liked playing casually. Always UV-Max (although recently I've toyed with the idea of doing some pacifist runs), almost always slaughter or slaughter-adjacent, and always something with a difficult route. Initially I didn't really care all that much about speed, and was only focusing on getting exits, but over time I've become more interested in the routing side of things (along with a desire to produce "clean" demos).