The Tavern

So, gammafunk started a new crawl stream for his turncount speedruns, and part of the process of getting it listed on SRL involved participating in a race. He and pubby just raced some NES games, but it got me thinking: could you do a realtime Crawl race?

I think one of the best examples of how it would work would be the recent Jelly Bowl, which was a race of Lufia II's Ancient Cave. As with Crawl, death comes very easily in the Ancient Cave, so the organizers developed a points system. I imagine that's what you'd do for Crawl; points for runes, points for getting to branch ends, point losses for deaths, etc. The realtime speed records seem to suggest that a time limit of 3 hours would probably be fair, insofar as top players who are trying to go fast can win the game in about half that time.

Thoughts?

Oh that's interesting, I hadn't thought of how they might have a specific scoring system for that. I thought it was more or less a traditional realtime speedrun. I'm not sure, but this might end up being similar to a crawl tournament or the the CSDC that WalkerBoh ran a few times, but with an emphasis on realtime.

I think there aren't a lot of people who do realtime runs of crawl in general, let alone any of those racing on twitch/SRL. I haven't really done realtime runs and would have to practice both to see how fun it is and to get any good at it. You'd really need a few or at least one person who does these runs to define the best runs conditions and to kind of get the thing going by doing them, probably in a stream or at least a video series.

This also seems like a contest that would benefit heavily from having seeds, so that all players are playing the same game.

I recommend watching that Jelly Bowl link. Sure, seeds would make it possible to have a perfectly fair and real race, but absent those, a time-limited game for points looks like it could be pretty frantic and fun.

That said, obviously I'm not a great realtime runner, and the only player who has really focused on webtiles runs (the only thing that would be both fair and interesting to watch, if streaming local tiles is problematic) is Bloax. He's shown you can get really crazy times, even with a bum connection (he would reset every few minutes), but it's true that there isn't much of a community of rta folks.

I bet it'd be a matter of a bit of practice for most skilled players, though, to start turning in sub-3-2:00:00 times routinely with top combos, tbh.

FWIW I am slowly working on a branch to implement correct seeded runs.

I am a terrible programmer so I don't dare committing on anything with the dev team, but I have some hope to get something going at some point.

I have been doing a little thinking about implementing this, please see my thread in Game Design Discussion and let us know what you're up to, so we don't duplicate work.

Ah I wouldn't mind if somebody else actually did it -- I commented on your thread.