Trysdyn Black

I'm an odd type of speedrunner. Three to four times a year I go hunting for strange offbeat games no one has run (or usually even heard of) before, to route and showcase for major marathons.

With SNES Superstars 2018 set to be announced soon after New Year, I went looking early for my offbeat offering for next year. I found it (or one of them anyway) in Neugier: Umi to Kaze no Kodō. This game is Wolf Team all the way through: beautifully thought out and executed with the requisite amount of Wolf Team jank present in the mechanics and gameplay.

Of particular interest here is the ranking system. At the end of the game you're assigned a rank from 1 to 20, with an appropriate title attached. My first playthru got me the rank of "Normal gamer" at 14. As I began to develop a speedrun route I passed through "Masterful Player" at rank 8, then "Beyond Champion" at 4, "Over the Top" at 3, and finally "King of Kings" at 2. Quite the superlative! However rank 1 eluded me. At this point I was completing the game in 20 minutes, down from 2 hours for the rank 14 play.

I did some research and found from game's one FAQ and its translation patch notes that rank seems to be based purely on in-game time and that rank 1 was translated in the English patch to be "Couch Potato". I was now playing on the Japanese version though (as I was doing proper speedruns), so I wanted to see what the title for rank 1 was in the Japanese version. I set out on a stream with the explicit purpose of getting Rank 1, calling it "The quest to become the potato".

It turned out to be a five hour stream as I honed my route and shaved off seconds. About ten attempts in I cut the 20:00 mark, which I thought for sure would give me the desired result. To my dismay I was once again assigned the rank of "Rank 02: King of Kings". Okay fine! At that point I knew ranks 2, 3, and 4 were on one minute increments: sub 21, sub 22, and sub 23 respectively but apparently the illustrious Potato title requires yet more. Back to the grind!

Finally while practicing the Stage 4 boss, I discovered a strategy that cut an entire cycle off the fight. I cut 27 seconds off my personal best and sat with bated breath as the credits scrolled. My chat intoned "Time for potato?!" as the azure cloud-textured text scrolled by and then, there it was...

  PLAY TIME
  00:18:50

   YOU ARE
GOKUTSUBUSHI
   RANK 01

Chat exploded. One of the viewers volunteered the translation: layabout, good-for-nothing, deadbeat... Yeah okay, Couch Potato is a good translation for this. A bit kinder maybe. In the afterglow as I tore down stream and cut the video of the run a thought occurred. While I don't consider this to be an optimized play at all, it seems to me they calibrated the ranking system to align almost perfectly with a good speedrun of the game.

I direly want to know the story behind this. Did someone at Wolf Team speedrun the game? Did they sit around on lunch break trying to finish an alpha of it the fastest and then calibrated rank 1 for whoever did so? More importantly, has anyone gotten rank 1 in this before? I peeked around and couldn't find much, but I also acknowledge that I really can't search, for example, Nicovideo well because of language barriers.

In any case, sub-18 in-game time is possible, and I'm curious if it's going to wrap back around to the special rank of Rank 21: Cheater if I do it.

This is something I've been kicking around in my head for awhile and I think it's matured enough to finally post it.

( Prelude: Some math stuff I'm cutting to make this SLIGHTLY less huge )

Using this, I've hammered out four different personality types of speedrunner. Now, this isn't a hard and fast delineation just like the MBTI isn't a hard and fast delineation; some people are multiple types, some are situational, some are none of the above.

Also worthy of note: most everyone of all types can agree speedrunning (and gaming in general) is fun. Isn't that why we're all here? ;)

Type 1 is what I call the "Game/Series fan", these folks are fans of a game or series first and a speedrunner second. They're usually the ones who, when asked "Why do you speedrun?", say things like "I liked the game and wanted an excuse to play more of it". They usually focus on one game or a series, but often run it "their way" and may choose to not use optimal routes or strategies, so their times can be all over the leaderboard; but that's okay because they often don't care about leaderboards. Those that do care about leaderboards often want to dominate the entire series they run. Examples that come to mind for me: werster, DarkspinesSonic, kmac, Big Jon.

Type 2 are what I call "Starters" or "Experimental runners". These are folks who love finding new speedgames, routing them, and getting a good run out there for people to see before moving on. They often pick up a new speedgame on a whim, have dozens (or sometimes hundreds) of games they've run, and will randomly see a game for the first time and decide they want to run it. They live in the first section or two of the graph above and often are seen running really obscure titles that have never been routed before. Examples: authorblues, garbanzcurity, Trysdyn (Yes that's a shameless self-promo).

Type 3 are "Competition runners", or "Grinders", or "What most people consider to be a normal speedrunner". These are the folks who have a small cluster of games they run and they want to run them as well as they can. They usually care the most about position on the leaderboard, aiming to "bop" other runners and foster friendly competition. They live in the first three sections of the graph, usually focusing on one game until they either have the World Record, or meet a goal they set for them self (and it's usually a decently lofty one). While Type 2's may focus on a game for 1-2 weeks at a time, Type 3's focus on one for 1-2 (or more) months at a time. They run one game long enough to have a reputation for being "That guy who runs that game", while sometimes having smaller side-flings. Examples: Toad, Klaige, Skavenger216.

Finally Type 4, which may be an extension of Type 3, are the extreme grinders. These are runners who run one game, are typecast as running that game, and aim to push past World Record and into lowering the run time as much as they possibly can. They may pick one game and run it for months or years, while seldom looking into another project. Usually it's a game they love, so if they reach their goal with the game, they'll fall back to another type, or stop speedrunning altogether. Examples: darbian, FuriousPaul, Zoast, Arcus (formerly with Ninja Gaiden).

So I guess really the simplistic view is "How much do you want to grind". Really though I've noticed a major MO difference between the types, on top of just their dedication to a specific game. As examples: Type 1's love Sonic/Pokemon/Castlevania/etc, Type 2's love routing random games and experiencing new things, Type 3's want to be the best at their game, and Type 4's want to push themselves and their game to the limit. How much they grind is a product of the MO, not the other way around.

So what productive use does this type inventory have? None really. I just found it interesting to ponder on. Running around typing runners is probably not productive in the least, but it does shine a light on how the hows and whys of speedrunning change so drastically depending on who you talk to. We all do it for different reasons.

I'm definitely a habitual Type 2, myself. ;)

Awhile back I changed the colors I use in my speedrun timer. I kind of quickly glossed over how it was for accessibility and to let colorblind individuals be able to more easily tell the difference between splits. After witnessing and being involved in a discussion with some other speedrunners on the topic I thought I'd expand a bit.

( Background: What a speedrun timer is, what splits are, etc )

The problem is the colors used by default in speedrun timers aren't very distinguishable for people with certain types of colorblindness. An alternate color set has been floating around the scene for awhile, most recently improved by HalfCoordinated. You can see a showcase of it on his Twitter here. This palette moves 'good' and 'bad' splits further apart on the spectrum to increase hue differentiation, and make it easier for a colorblind person to tell them apart. It also utilizes a feature of LiveSplit to make 'gold' splits appear in a transitioning rainbow.

I took this a step further and proposed adding this more accessible palette to the default layout list in LiveSplit. This was an operation I thought would manifest as a simple pull request to the project's GitHub page, but the developers chimed in with some ideas to even further expand the concept, and this is where the discussion started.

As I said, green, red, and gold is pretty deeply embedded in the community. So embedded, actually, that some people dislike the more accessible palette out of concern that it causes confusion for people who aren't "with it" enough to recognize what the new hues mean. Other criticisms include that colorblind people are used to it already, that colorblind people can use other data in the timer to differentiate (such as the actual split time), and that adding another feature to timers just for the sake of a small audience isn't worth the effort and code bloat.

I'm not here to argue by proxy with these objections, I merely list them to outline my next point: that these objections are exactly why I want the more accessible palette to grow in adoption. Arguably it's NOT a "big deal", colorblind people CAN use additional data to figure out what's going on, and it MAY cause confusion, but all of these concerns are transitional. For me this isn't only about suddenly breaking down a barrier that prevents colorblind people from getting involved in a good run (though it will help!); it's about bringing an issue to the forefront that most people don't think about.

When I changed my split colors to something close to HC's palette above, I got a lot of questions about why from people who had never considered the default was impossible for some people to differentiate. It sparked discussion and thought. This small change, which ultimately only made a small difference to 1 or 2 of my viewers, made 4 or 5 of them think more about accessibility for a moment. Maybe one of them walked away with the understanding that green/red is sub-optimal for accessibility, and will remember that the next time they design something.

It's just colors, and it's just redundant data that can be sussed out via other means if you can't differentiate the hues, and all my viewers understand how my splits work with or without colors, but it's something I have control over that could make more abled people think a little bit more about disability. I guess that's the big deal for me.

That's why I want to see it become the default for more streamers.

I guess since I'm not quite so hesitant to Just Write Stuff here, maybe I can actually keep track of projects and stuff here. I tried on my site blog but felt like it was spamming really.

At the moment there's really three things on my plate but my time's been short lately because I'm doing some side work to get some things moved around in the house I live in.

First is the writing project. I finally have a fire under my arse about getting moving on that. I'd spent about 3 months researching how to host the dang thing because I didn't really enjoy the idea of using a blog for it because blog engines don't really sort prose (especially serial, chronological prose) in a way that makes it easy to read. I think the solution I came to is a crosspost to Dreamwidth and a engine I wrote from scratch on my site. I could even script it to post to both with one shell script and text file, if I wanted to be that dorky :)

Second is I accidentally became a Rockin' Kats speedrunner, but not a good one. I need to become a good one. It's kind of shocking that in my PB I landed all the tricks and still got a 25:30 VS the 19:15 that is the world record. Six minutes of movement slop to fix. To be fair, the 25 was my 3rd finished run ever, so it's not like it's unexpected.

Finally third is I have yet another marathon on the horizon and will need to derust Shining Soul II and Rolan's Curse II for it. I'm just glad I get to show them off in a marathon because they're neat games and the community for both is basically me and one other person.

So you know, a ton of things and I'll probably finish one of them, as I do. :)