We’d like to formally invite you all to a competition of speed. It’s the first event of this kind for Dynasthir. And we are very excited to do our best in hosting it. Shoot from the hip & end up on target.

In my years delving ever deeper into games; Few things have fascinated me as much as the true dedication and depth speedrunners will go to, preferably to avoid playing anything of a game at all. In doing so, they often end up playing it more than anyone else.

This is the dichotomy I want to invite you to partake in. As a community I’d like you to obsess about details, talk about strategies. Will you persist against a clock, heading towards the end of time?

Together with Retro Plus Games, who’s currently developing their dream tabletop game Dracula's Curse which is a crimson love child born of a lifelong passion for games and Goliath Guitars Game Development who is a solo developer who’s pushing the boundaries of tool design for use in Unreal with performance & usability in mind; We, the TwinlakeMinstrels have gathered up a price pool of 500 USD for the competition.

With these amazing people backing us up, we can confidently move forward and give back more to our community. What follows is the allocation of the price pool & the rules for the competition.

Price Allocation 300 USD goes to 1st place winner 100 USD goes to 2nd place winner 75 USD goes to 3rd place winner 25 USD goes to best new speed tech as judged by the Jury

Rules

• Runs have to be live streamed and available to the public
• Practice can be off-cam
• Runs have to be Completed in a time under sixteen minutes and thirty seconds (16:30) to Qualify
• Qualify is defined as entering the Run into the competition to be considered for a Price
• People may perform & submit as many runs they want. Significant runs should be linked and marked with the runners name and time
• Timer begins after the Intro Cutscene
• Timer ends after the Sovereigns end speech, right after the word “Crucible”
• There will be a week of Discovery between 13/05/2024 ending at 20:00 GMT+1 on the seventh day
• There will be a week of runs between 20/05/2024 ending at 20:00 GMT+1 on the seventh day
• This is an Any% speedrun, meaning as long as the word “Crucible” has been spoken by the Sovereign NPC in the Scene at the “natural” end of the Demo. Anything goes until that point. And this counts as the Demo being “Completed”
• Strategies found during the week of Runs are required to be shared on the TwinlakeMinstrel Discord
• Links to runs have to be shared on the TwinlakeMinstrel Discord
• Links to New trick discovery have to be shared on the TwinlakeMinstrel Discord
• If any of the rules are wrangled by rule bending smart asses the Jury reserve the right to make a judgment call
• External applications to tamper with the game code is not allowed. For example Cheat Engine, Unreal Unlocker, AI or any TAS tools

Access Request access at the Steam Page at

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2145210/Dynasthir/

Join the Discord to share runs & strats for eligibility

https://discord.gg/ExweE8Kutk

Jury

Mireneye Creative Lead at TwinlakeMinstrels

Ulfgang Animations, Combat & UI Lead Designer at TwinlakeMinstrels

John Excellent exalted of Retro Plus Games, www.draculascurse.com

Jackson Tools Developer & Tutor at Goliath Guitars Game Development, https://www.patreon.com/goliathgamedevelopment/

Countdown start! Competition starts in 2 days!

We will be opening the Playtest gates on Sunday so people have time to download it. And it gives us some time to adjust for unforeseen situations before Monday. Discovery week kicks off on Monday. And let me tell you, there are some crazy tricks you can pull off in Dynasthir. I've spent a lot of time exploring what is possible, and I can't wait for you guys to do the same. We will also open some new Discord channels specifically for the competition on Sunday.

We are also talking internally on how to deal with tricks that may be framerate dependant. To make the competition fair for people with different framerates. Ideally we can have a competition where the difference is not big enough that it makes a significant impact on the runs. And if tricks pop up that do, we will have to make a judgement call. Ultimately if you find something clever we want to encourage that, but also make it fair to those who can't run the game at more than 30 fps.

Event is going well as we are nearing the end of our Week of Discovery. People are free to join in whenever! We got some runs recorded by people and there are definitive improvements that can be made too the runs. Come make it even more of a competition worth remembering!