Speedrunners are terrible. They ruin games for everyone, and love to talk about how your coders are buffoons when they perform intricate tricks with elaborate setup and tight inputs that no ordinary player would ever think of doing, let alone be able to perform. Here’s how to drive these pests away from your games.
First, make an inaccurate ingame timer. Include load times (multiplied by 2, so now everyone needs to buy an SSD), cutscenes, character creation, time since the game was started. Hide it until they beat the game so they can’t reliably check if it’s accurate without cross referencing another timer.
Next, make file management annoying, or impossible. Utilize cloud saves, have events in one save affect events in a new game. Store savedata in the game files, encrypted, so they’re difficult to access, and difficult to modify. This makes starting completely fresh annoying.
Include unskippable cutscenes or autoscrollers that are about a minute or more, and vary their length randomly. Unskippable cutscenes are intensely irritating to speedrunners who just want to play the game. If they’re too long, the runner can take a break, but if they’re only a minute or so, they can’t comfortably do anything but sit and wait. Prompt the player to continue with text to make them all the more annoying.
Add RNG to practically everything. Damage, speed, enemy behavior, drops, etc. Be sure to include a big time saver powerup or item as a random drop that can only be obtained about a third of the way through the game, so speedrunners are obliged to obtain it, and need to waste time playing the game to see if it’ll drop. If you can work multiple of these in, all the better.
Ruin the wrists of speedrunners by including actions that go faster or deal more damage per second when they mash harder. Make the speedup from mashing grow exponentially as they mash faster, so the fastest possible mash has a significantly bigger benefit.
Next, don’t implement deltatime correctly for framerate independence. Make it so the timescale is faster at lower FPS, so that in order to move fastest, you need to reduce the FPS to as low as possible. Additionally, don’t benchmark the game to any specific FPS, just let it do whatever it wants, so then speedrunners need to argue about where to set the framerate standard, and need to force it to behave with outside programs. Make the input delay vary randomly over time, and don’t have a buffer for actions. This makes any frame-perfect input more difficult, and in general makes the game more frustrating to play.
Vary the speed of things like elevators and doors based on the difficulty picked. Higher difficulties should have faster elevators and doors, but also higher self-damage where applicable, forcing runners to play on the highest difficulty in order to get the fastest times.
Include drop-in online elements like Dark Souls so runners need to intentionally disconnect the game from the internet. Combine this with Denuvo, or other always-online DRM, which should also be set up to avoid tampering with Cheat Engine, which speedrunners use to practice and occasionally mod out RNG. Between these, runners will either need to accept that runs include online elements, they’ll need to authenticate with denuvo and play offline until authentication expires, or crack the game outright to disable always-online.
Make the game fast, make it linear (or open world, but with a linear sequence of objectives), and make it so the player snaps onto a bunch of environmental features, but has random animations of random length for traversing them. This helps narrow the skill gap, and introduce more random variation in timing. Making it linear makes the routing less difficult, and making it fast is something that you’d think would appeal to speedrunners, but they’re actually indifferent about. Making it open world means everything takes longer than it needs to. When making it open world, be sure that every event flag checks for multiple prerequisite event flags, so nothing can be completed out of order.
Don’t allow players to bind anything to scroll wheel, especially not jump or use. This has been used in countless games for various exploits.
Practice good coding conventions, don’t mutate state unnecessarily, use a strongly typed language with collections and avoid using pointers. Have each element interact with as few others as possible. Validate and sanitize your inputs. More safe coding practices means less glitches. Design mechanics to have a singular purpose that it accomplishes with no variation in output and no interaction with other elements. This reduces the chance of players finding unexpected uses of mechanics.
Thoroughly wall off areas that aren’t supposed to be accessed. Include kill planes in out of bounds areas. Don’t spawn loading zones before they’re supposed to be accessed. Lock players in rooms/arenas until they’re done with their current objective, or defeating all enemies. If players aren’t supposed to reach an area yet, make sure it’s unreachable, either with walls, or by making sure it doesn’t exist until it’s supposed to be reached. If possible, define levels in terms of areas the player is supposed to be, so they can’t exist outside of the places you want them to be.
Bundle bugfixes with new content patches, especially new bosses and new areas, because it forces all bosses and 100% runners to run on the patched version of the game in order to meet the category requirements.
Of course, a lot of these things make the game worse, even for casual players, but there’s no price too high to remove the speed demon menace!