Welp, after my most dedicated gamer and player Squibs spent like easily 14 hours or more into this simple HTML game, alongside the efforts of my other friends, Squibs has finally found a way to attain a literal perfect score via an oversight in how I handled death outside the camera. Initially, the purpose of having the character die outside the view of the camera laterally is to prevent softlocks from players traversing outside the view of the camera, but it appears the death collision was just a tad bit too short, and Squibs was able to jump past it. With some careful maneuvers and map knowledge, he was able to complete the next checkpoint WITHOUT finishing the current checkpoint. From there, resetting the map at any point will always reset the score to 0 from this bug. This allowed a perfect score of 1000000, effectively 0 seconds. 

Now, this bug is easily fixable (extending the collision of the off-screen killzones), but this showcase of the perfect run has sparked some ideas in me. On one hand, Squibs admit that this bug ruins the leaderboard since it doesn't require skill, only knowledge, to execute, but also admits that successfully pulling off this trick while also knowing your way around the map outside the borders of the camera is a really cool strat, and rewards map knowledge and spending time and effort into learning and labbing consistent routes. As such, it becomes a hard decision on whether or not to patch this strat out. This led to a discussion, and following up on my previous devlog, how to embrace this bugs, and instead, if there's a way to incorporate this into regular gameplay, and instead design the game around this.

I have gotten some inspiration from game speedrunning. In the speedrunning community, there are multiple categories for speedruns in games. 

• There's Any% category, which is where one attempts to complete the game as fast as possible, regardless of how much of the game they complete.
• There's the 100% category, where one also attempts to complete the game as fast as possible, but they have to collect every thing in the game (i.e. 120 Stars in Super Mario 64).
• But there's a much lesser renowned category called Low%, where the goal is to complete the game while collecting as little things as possible, like skipping levels, bosses or necessary items.

  
  

  • What makes Low% categories unique from the other 2 is that Low% are sorted by how many things are collected first, and then time. I.e., if speedrunner 1 managed to finish the game in 2 minutes while collecting 10 things, but speedrunner 2 took 2 hours to finish the game but managing to collect only 9 things, speedrunner 2 has the better score.
  • Note: Low% isn't always the same as Any%, as in many games, collecting extra unnecessary items in Any% runs can help save time in the long run. (I.e. collecting extra bullets to clear enemies faster, ultimately saving time. Extra bullets are NOT required, therefore would worsen a Low% run.)

Taking inspiration from the Low% category of speedruns, in the next update of this game, I plan to design a game where skipping checkpoints is still entirely possible, but add another highscore to track this: a Time Highscore and a Checkpoint Highscore. This allows simultaneous leaderboards that can track both highscores, based on how much time you took and how many checkpoints you could skip respectively. Then, combined they can make a sort of "Master" Leaderboard where the scores are sorted first by how many checkpoints could be skipped, and then the total time. This way, I can still retain the aspect of skipping checkpoints and off-screen maneuvering while still retaining competition, rewarding skill checks and map knowledge all at the same time. 

How I will pull this off will be in the moderate indeterminate future, but I am writing this devlog to consider the possibility of a game centered around this "Low%" philosophy. The idea of a self-sufficient character that can scale any obstacle by themselves trying to break the levels and attain the best time seems to have a lot of potential, offering tons of replayability and experimentation to push the limits of the game further and further. I will explore this idea... maybe for my final year project perhaps! I'm excited!

But for now, this bug is still in the game. See if you can pull it off yourself!

-J2R3