Been a long time, and I have a really stupid idea.

[Cosmic Dolphin]

So, uh, hey. I wonder how many years it's been since I really actively played. And yes, I have been on the discord for a while now.

This game took up so much of my childhood/teen years, and I love it dearly. I will always remember it.

So, you might be wondering what my stupid idea is.
Basically, after college, I got really into speedrunning video games. Heck, I've been doing that for nearly 10 years now. A side project of that that I help with is setting up a blind tournament for speedrunners where they have an hour to do something in a game they have never seen before. It's called Kusogrande - and as you may gather from that name, it's for bad games. Armagetron Advanced is a terrific game, but I still wanted to make folks think about it again.

So, I had a wild idea pop up in my mind - why not get a collection of the worst racing maps ever made, make some of my own maps from hell, and make complete strangers to the concept of Armagetron play them for an hour since everyone who signs up for these tournaments already love pain.

This is just something in my head that I am messing with. It would be quite a while off to actually realize this. If anyone has any suggestions for bad maps or has the arena design tool still, hit me up please. I'll probably be bugging folks about how to set up a server for this idea as well. Thanks all!

Edit: Holy cow, Vectron is so much easier for making maps than what I remember using way back in the day. Glad I found that.

[Z-Man]

Sounds like a fun idea! Go for it, I'd say.

Just one thing: I heard once that straight up RACING games are not popular with speedrunners because the point of the game already is to go fast, so speedrunning them is no different than playing them normally. So I would pick maps and settings where you don't control the speed, but rather where the challenge is to just not crash.

[sinewav]

This is just something in my head that I am messing with.

What's up my man? Good to see you!

As Z said, I don't think racing maps are the best choice, but rather you should use maps that make use of conquering zones. You can design some interesting "levels" and place different objectives in the map. Some features might be: expanding and contracting death zones, Rim acceleration, and places where precision turning is needed to complete the level in the best time. And more importantly, here it the thing you want to avoid: RNG.

I've been watching a speedrunner from a different game over the years and a lot of times RNG plays a pretty substantial role in his times, sometimes as much as 5 seconds. Arma bots are the kind of random that make for a more interesting single player game but not a good speedrunning game. I know you aren't specifically designing a speedrunning map, but I'm just thinking of your audience.

This sounds like a project I would be totally into if I had time (I don't)! Hopefully you can come up with something we can watch. Also, do you have any of your speedruns uploaded on and of those sites like speedrunner.com?