Neon White Developers React to 35 Minute Speedrun (World Record)

[Music] using the fireball is like really fun oh this is what i'm talking about hold on wait this is going really off script here he's got 14 rockets is he just going to shoot his way up this building you got to be kidding me [Music] hi my name is ben esposito and i'm the director of neon white and with me is russell and carter from the team hey i'm russell honor i did programming and some level design hey i'm carter um i did a lot of levels and did some art and whatnot on the game cool so we're just going to jump right into this and watch the speed run with this is a new world record we haven't seen this before so let's go maybe tomorrow it's gonna be tomorrow in 10 minutes we'll just keep going okay so this level is maybe the most speed run level of the game and i did not necessarily intend for it to be yeah it's like mostly just running on the water so i didn't expect really go so hard on it but uh it's pretty cool yeah did you hear about the tech that you are supposed to jump off of the water and bump your head yeah it's like um i think they do that in like minecraft speed runs too where like you like spam the jump so like i don't know what about the physics is doing that i actually don't know uh so the way the water works is you actually get the water boost as long as you're close to the water not it's not based on whether or not you're on the water itself so you don't have any like ground resistance when you're floating just above it but you are getting the boost so you do go faster okay i guess the ceiling also gives you a boost i don't know it keeps you closer i think it just keeps you close i think we should intro the game a little bit and just yeah sure so this game is you know it's called neon white it's a speed running like first person platformer and the gimmick is that guns are cards that you can discard for a unique ability so in this you can kind of see he's got a pistol and and is discarding it in order to get a second jump so that's the basic idea and it's not just get to the end as fast as you can it's also kill all the enemies that the end unlocks so it's not as simple as just going straight towards the end right it kind of killing the enemies makes it into kind of a puzzle where you have to make sure everything is clear before you touch the ending and that was kind of like the early idea was like this would be a little bit of an action puzzle game and over time we made it way less puzzly yeah it's just like a roller coaster oh wow i didn't damn yeah i found ways to make it puzzly anyways it all worked out that's true i mean you can see stuff like um shooting your own bomb here where um the way that one of the hidden texts in the game is that you can parry bullets with your katana or you can shoot another enemy bullet and you'll see this white ring appear around the bullet um that gives you a very slight speed boost uh but something we didn't know going into this was you could parry your own bullet if you launch it and stick to a surface and then start shooting at it so you might see some stuff like that that it works for this prfi card as well as the rocket launcher later on you can tell exactly how far along the process of mental breakdown man they've already finished the first mission yeah the first mission i don't know like i feel like we had a conversation that we were like concerned that the first mission wouldn't be very fun because it was too simple yeah there aren't a lot of mechanics yet but then people just love to choose every little bit of speed that they can get out of that but we also really just like didn't expect people to go so hard with like the water plane because like i when i was designing levels i just kind of like it was there i kind of treated it like lower heaven where it's like a death box kind of thing but um people you know used it to its full potential which is really cool yeah people spent more figured out how to spend more time on water in ways that i like never imagined this is a very ancient level but it got redesigned at the last second to actually be good man it's just like we can't even talk about a level because yeah this is also a pretty old one i think but yeah got some changes okay nice pair yeah this is a super old school one we moved that last enemy around a million times so it didn't feel too hard to get the shot oh this level we actually added that glass platform last second right yeah yeah and uh we didn't adjust the leaderboards before released so there were pictures on the discord of me uh people accused me of being a cheater because i just because we hadn't reset the leaderboards yet and so me and all the testers had like two seconds faster than everyone else yeah we are like we added those glass platforms to the beginning of that level because we had realized like we never actually introduced the concept of glass platforms by that point so we kind of slapped it on and i think it works as a tutorial another one got edited like last minute right with the shortcut yeah glass platform shortcut yeah russell you did this shortcut i did do this one because this was actually a level so old that it was before the concept of uh having an intentional shortcut in every single level so like at the last minute we kind of went back and revisited those and made sure they had like really meaningful shortcuts yeah it was totally unintentional oh yeah you're supposed to bomb off that uh um guardian head and then bomb into the window that was open and then dash across but uh it was a lot faster to apparently go down and skip like that entire kind of sequence but it looks cool so who cares it looks cool i mean the windows make it feel really intentional those round windows yeah i'm glad this helps oh this is i feel like a lot of people learn about the shooting bullet mechanic here just because you get the um the the triple shot guys and you just kind of spam there while you're going down the stairs so you get like a massive visual like speed boost which is pretty cool oh yeah you get all these rings yeah yeah i mean even for like those those are the only enemies that move they jump and uh you know i wasn't sure if we should keep that in the game okay but i just people hate it which is awesome yeah it's kind of yeah it just adds texture because like they're not random at all they'll always jump at the same exact time i do love that there's one level towards the end of the game where you can take advantage of that for a skip is there i don't know which one yeah um the book of life level oh my god i don't know if they're gonna use that skip but when we get to that level we should talk about it oh yeah we'll see if see if we still have some sort of arcane knowledge that the speedrunners don't have yet yeah okay so this level i never thought of sniping those barrels at the very beginning oh god yeah that's it's physical shortcut no this level is oh my god yeah that's that one's insane the reason why the uh the goal is so low is just because i wanted a cool moment where you get knocked up and then see the whole level and then like slam down and i did not mean it for me to like be such a cool shortcut but it worked out so it's a pure sniping level yeah that that one was hard but hinton because there was just so many good shortcuts in it oh he has like chock full of optimizations yeah and usually you know we try to show you like a little bit of like the actual shortcut but that one was just so right as opposed to the one we just saw which yeah like kind of a weird one to optimize there's a cold what the heck you can do that okay did you guys intend that because i didn't make this level that's that's a cool shortcut no i didn't have everything of course yeah sorry i'm a bad moment russell added that shortcut at the end where you can snipe that kind of like horseshoe shape and then go straight down i think that worked out really good this one was another ancient one that we added a shortcut to at the very end as well i mean there this looks like a pretty like straightforward use of of the shortcut where you just don't even scale the building at all i think in that last part oh i've seen this this is nuts okay this is silly well no this was the uh the other shortcut that was intended wait this isn't it's like oh my god there's windows there right that's why your camera clips through the window yeah that's we wouldn't absolutely put windows places well that's amazing yeah no i like always thought like ah there's got to be some way to not do the intro but wow they figured out a place to do it uh i really do enjoy the boss level speed runs i can never get a shot like i had to implement the achievement to get uh an early kill in this level and it was a struggle for me yeah god that's amazing really cool you have to like double bomb the boss and then shoot the bomb itself to get a speed boost and then you fly up oh wow and then you beat him to the ground pretty good wow that's bananas oh the sonic rings he's not he's not using the rings oh yeah no you're supposed to use now this yeah the rings are a very late addition as well to like help teach uh what angle you should point this card at because it kind of just launches you but you still have gravity on so oh yeah and this level is all about bullet parrying where these things shoot a ton of bullets and then you if you do it just right you can get like a huge kick forward running them we're players being pretty annoyed with that level because they wanted to like fireball everywhere after the first level and they got to get stuck with just shooting but it was like an older level that we need to do we don't like throw away so oh well you gotta deal with it it's some legacy legacy design it's fine is it more efficient to drop there i didn't realize interesting people have kind of found that like it's always faster to fireball on the ground itself and the reason why is because when you are fired when you're in fireball mode and you're touching the ground it behaves exactly as if you're on water so you kind of like forcibly trigger like a waterway when you do that and it uh prob that's like the fastest thing in the game is being on water so i think they try to spend as much time on the ground as possible like that oh there's another shortcut that got like changed last minute right yeah it did because we needed like a that one's full of optimizations but it needed like a really beefy thing to skip i think that one worked that was nice i mean i always save the fireball here so i can like shoot down onto the water faster that's probably sufficient though i have no idea this kind of way way better than me this is a fun one just because like the optimization is nuts like the speed which we can get through that level is crazy yeah i'm like i like that these didn't get very long in the middle like these levels are still really short so you get these very like okay what the hell that was a move so if you haven't played this level there's like explicit barrels in the wall there that you're supposed to go inside that room but apparently you could just be on the outside oh my god have you guys seen the shortcut it's oh my god it's disgusting oh you snipe everything from the outside first yeah oh my you're not supposed to go up there no pulled it off i like i mean it's always technically possible but like that's ridiculous i remember we talked about like yeah maybe someone could do it we'll we'll find out oh yeah you carter you reworked this one at the last minute i love this level it now it needed a little little love um yeah i like it i think i do the shortcut a lot where you like bomb stuff from far away and then you know stomp or do something else but like it's always fun to just add it it just feels satisfying yeah it feels good oh this might be one of my favorite shortcuts i think it's it's so satisfying i love that yeah there's like a whole room that you can skip by just flying over the side i think it showcases the tripod oh this is a cool i just added those water things for like flavor and like they actually used it's super cool yeah yeah that was i never even thought to use those waterways because they're just decorative this is like pretty straightforward yeah oh you guys added like um parts that weren't waterway to the little like waterway section to make the shortcut stronger right because the water's so good we have to get rid of water yeah we had to nerf it so that our shortcut was actually more of a shortcut i think this is one of like the first like hang gardens levels i ordered it's such a fun area to art just because like you just tossed plants everywhere yeah i think this one came out really cool this shortcut's always fun like people like can't think of it and as soon as it hits them they have that big aha moment which is always like very fun to watch okay this is what i wanted people to do here use your katana as you fall to swipe every single thing oh that's so good which one of you guys did this level because i know i got that last edition pretty late i think i was the one to i that level sucked right and then at the last minute i like ripped everything out of the center of it and then made it more of like a a little roller coaster falling down slashing everything yeah the the more intentionality of the like enemies is way cooler now it was meaner before i think it was it's trying to screw you up way too much oh my god for this section um i meant to put a shortcut here and forgot so like now it's just kind of like jumping on balloons for way too long like i i feel kind of bad it looks like they shot one he optimized a little bit yeah a little bit yeah oh this this level yeah though this is 100 intentional he's gonna do i definitely meant for this one oh yeah he's not doing the crazy one okay never mind well this is actually intentional but that last shot is like probably too hard to pull off but you know it's okay i've seen someone do this level where every single one of those shockers they killed from the other side of the door oh like from the outside of the ring yeah i wonder if that's like a riskier strat i think it's probably super risky i mean that's your shortcut normally is hard enough to do you like perfectly aim that purify yeah i can't say that one is easy for me to pull off definitely could have grouped the enemies a little nicer but you know people deal with it okay fine this one oh this is cool just don't even go up there yeah i didn't think of that saving an extra uzi like that there's another pretty old level i remember like it was like the main level was like pretty fun and then i just like edited on top of it and like just turned the entire like level around to go through the um the arch at the beginning just to create a cooler looking starting point but um the shocker bullets as they were moving away from him just for that speed boost yeah like they got like three three yeah on them and the micro optimizations are real this is one of the cooler levels of the game easily i think ames has made this one and it's really yeah this was ames and it was i can't imagine what it was like to set every single one of these up it's not like we have a special tool for making chains of these things but yeah this is i love this shortcut where you have to kind of like you're racing the tripwires but you have to cut them short just at the right time so that you can still make it to the end wait did you get a speed boost from shooting the force field no there's the three bullets coming out oh okay all right so fast i couldn't even tell uh this is like the first um like bubble level when we redesigned the force fields and i think it was like the perfect concept and i think it ended up working pretty well i love that shortcut where you like stomp through the balloon rather than sorry sorry through the bubble rather than going up through it yeah i i'm a pretty big fan of this shortcut band too just the boom boom dash oh that's dope yeah oh there's another one that like was ancient i think it was just the beginning part of the only part that was saved at this point but like yeah i can't believe this level even exists oh oh then it's been redone a million times but it looks good this was a last minute one oh yeah this is like one of the later levels yeah definitely having fun with the um the new bubbles and whatnot i'm curious what they do at this part because it's full of water that you can kind of be just on top of they take the little there it is we added that just for them [Laughter] we weren't generous with that one though but you don't even know okay now this is like a justin level that um it originally ended right here like that that would be the end right there and then like i think a while ago i like added um the second half just so you could have the fun of like puzzling out and like well not puzzling but just destroying the uh the horrific trap that was set for you yeah i love that part what do people think of these enemies the mimics i hope they hate them i hate them too but i also love them where they just end up i mean they're just so like if you die from a mimic it's a hundred percent your fault it's also nice you don't have to aim as much with them you can like like i usually put them in a place with like a bunch of enemies you just like shoot a shotgun it like kills everything instead of like having actually like nice holy crap we were talking about we didn't think anyone could shortcut that part sick yeah i guess just playing got to put them all at the same height they're going to get hit by the mimic shots the guardians that is in that level and i remember the original mimik design right oh it was terrible don't even tell anybody okay all right i won't say what it used to do now you could say you could tell i don't no i can't it's just too horrific i'll i mean i'll just i'll just say it original originally mimics actually stole your cards so when you killed it you'd lose whatever card was in your hand and you had to kind of like puzzle out when to shoot them so that you wouldn't lose you know the next important card i thought it was really clever but no one else liked it and this person's so much better when they shoot the bullets out and kill you rocket jumping let's go we're already in mission eight there's only twelve oh you can that's smart pairing i don't even thought of that oh that's cool ah oh it goes through interesting okay i actually go around on that building nice yeah it's always funny like whenever you like uh you're designing a level and then you're like okay i need to add a shortcut so i'm just gonna like add this entire fun section and then like with the intention that people are gonna skip it yeah it's a little bit of a bummer when you make something actually cool yeah like this one like i really like that whole like spider-man section oh yeah you go around the building the other way it is true usually whatever you add for them to skip is more fun because you have a better understanding of the level at that point if you design the shortcut too late yeah like sad usually you can get around to like having um like designing like a shortcut like first so it ends up being like as fun or more fun than the main level and then like you know designing the wrist level after but like yeah a lot of the times the the weird stuff we force you to do that's slower is a lot more fun but i think we did a pretty good job of like hitting that middle ground yeah i think what's like the ratio of levels that we designed the shortcut first versus we added the shortcut after oh god i have no clue i have to like look through every level but probably 50 it might have been 50 yeah well there's a lot of levels we ended up throwing out because we we had an amazing shortcut but it actually was like not fun and it was pretty confusing to do it normally yeah i tried to do way too many levels that were like completely intertwining and stuff and just ended up being way too confusing and like not being confusing is the name of the game in this uh level design turns out it's important i like this this shortcut where you had to collect all the three fireballs and just skip right to the top of the building yeah that was a fun one uh have you guys seen the shortcut for this one okay he's not gonna do it but like someone did a shortcut where like um you just bam like all the balloons while you're like moving there like a little earlier and just end up going to the end like twice as fast it's ridiculous uh i like rockets i knew people could snipe stuff but when we were building these i didn't i wasn't thinking about like oh yeah you'll just be able to snipe everything from from the beginning straight away yeah i tried so hard to like make sure um all the shortcuts wouldn't end up just being like shoot everything from a distance and then ram your face into a wall and like just spam the rockets and then get to the end i think the very last level of this mission ended up being like that unintentionally but um it's it's still cool when it happens but it's definitely less interesting than actually like playing some stuff yeah this i mean i think you did a good job this one's fun just because it's like so different than the um the other rocket levels oh yeah they're not going to see where they jump to the side though maybe that's slower we were like oh it's so cool to jump side to side on these waterways but i mean the fastest thing is a straight line right well actually the fastest thing is a quantum tunneling space some people have been doing that when they cheat the leaderboard so what are they gonna do here this is a pretty vanilla right yeah kind of how it was intended yeah oh this level oh that's awesome when i saw like people doing this in the demo like oh my god this the speeders are gonna be nuts for this game and definitely way more than like we expected wow bopping your head on the ceiling there why did they do that i guess to not get too much height oh my god speed boost yeah that's a new tag whoa okay this was a last minute shortcut i think it worked oh yeah he's saying cool using the fireball is like really fun oh this is what i'm talking about hold on really off script here he's got 14 rockets is he just going to shoot his way up this building you got to be kidding me wow straight to the ending yeah that's great that one's good i like that i've actually seen that this level's really ripe with shortcuts as well yeah this had so many that we you weren't even sure where to put the short the hint right yeah oh yeah sniping were a little too rude but i guess people like it we i remember when we were designing this we never thought you could save this pistol here and just skip to the end but apparently it's possible which is dope the power of speedrunners yeah if there's a card they'll figure it out oh it's smart you'd save the um killing the guardian until later i guess wow ooh interesting oh i guess yeah i just cleaned it up later best thing about adding like a dominion card like what that one's good that's a good one okay wow yeah these are like so logical but i didn't really think of just standing there and shooting everything and going straight down i'm so glad you guys added those um fence things to this level because like the pathing was very confusing without them i think it ended up working masks the little shortcut you could snipe through to the end i loved it this part where you're like in the bridge i had to make at least one level worth at the the gauges at the start oh my god you tried like four or five times to make a level where the gate is at the start and they did not work it's a really cool idea on paper though oh the shortcut's fun oh my god that's awesome wow i love that i remember when i was making this um you're like oh you got to make it so you can like jump on the side and into that force field but not actually like touch the ground it'll be super cool it did look nice i think it worked oh this oh yeah we put this in after the demo because people were doing stuff like this and we were like yeah why not just like make it so you could literally like clear the whole map without even entering it but i'm gonna be honest i never actually was able to do that skip oh this is a skip that um i knew was like possible when i was making the level but uh never pulled it off efficiently it's like i feel like it saves like a second he's just gonna um yeah go straight up instead of doing a slightly longer one but yeah i didn't know i didn't even think i could just jump straight over my head there i would always go to the ending and then jump backwards that was cheeky oh using the stomp to get down faster to smart i'm so curious to see what players like reactions this level are is because like um it's just it's such an over the top level with how much crap you have to do this level i would say yeah is uh excessive in a fun way but it's like so big it's so full stuff definitely should have added a couple more shortcuts in but you know got to deal with it i mean it's fun to have like this like a lot of shooting in a level yeah i love the little uh balloon conglomerate i i think um that idea came from like ben's like test level there's like a bunch of balloons and i was like shooting with the shock i was like oh my god that'll totally be fun oh yeah i had a sandbox where i just spawned a bunch of balloons and i guess that i mean it turned out really cool it's fun to see it in a level it almost feels like a kind of a different a new enemy in a way i'll make a balloon oh this one's cool yeah i think i like to see people do this where they fly off the side of the building yeah i think that was one of my favorite shortcuts i made just skip the whole thing shoot this yeah i mean that's like that's like a classic example of like where do we start the shortcut hint so it really only shows you to skip like one floor and then it's up to like the player to realize oh i can actually skip all the floors yeah i think that's six i think that was pretty successful that didn't give every anything too too much away i was taking the time for this level and like people are like a solid like two three seconds faster than me and i have no clue where they save time was that run different than what you do um yeah not really they managed to stomp earlier i don't know how they did that but that's about it did that the smart way this time i think this was a justin level it was supposed to be like one of the last ones that's why it has so much stuff in it and then of course we continued adding stuff to the game this is cool ending oh nice they cleared away the glass earlier from that ending oh i totally missed that damn that's smart although what you can do is hilarious oh yeah i mean it goes from like a like a five minute level to like a 30-second level but it's like not that hard to do it's just like a little creative yeah i mean we're really victims of the low gravity when when building this little gravity just lets you kind of fly over to towards the ending oh this is even more towards the energy wow that's a rocket launcher i remember we were checking at the beginning we're like there's no way to save this rocket launcher but we are of course wrong they find a way all right i'm ready for this boss fight now this all took so long to make it probably i should have shortened it by like half but you know it was nice to let me uh make it long yeah you were really excited so i wanted to see what you can do this is the only level that's secretly two levels oh great because the inside the temple and outside are like we're we like hide a really quick load yeah yeah it's imperceptible that's good it even turned out pretty good on switch too you can you can't really notice when it transitions between worlds the coolest part about the short cut for this like boss fight i guess is that um they're like getting in um like fireball shotgun shots and dominion shots like between every single move and he moves so fast so i it's pretty cool they're able to do that yeah you have to shoot the rocket then break a crystal and then right you know he turns the shield off and gets hit it looks like oh wow can you clear it right here uh that's nuts oh my god i saw a run that ended like one stage after that and i thought that was unbelievable [Laughter] oh my god now these levels the book of here the game life of changes yeah if you don't know kill every enemy exactly yeah you just have to point this card at an enemy and you can teleport to it and you yeah and to finish the level you don't actually kill everything i just assumed that yeah like stuff like this like if you are a machine you can zoom through these levels so fast because the book of life you just point it and and then you're there oh what oh my gosh that isn't that's so funny because yeah if you miss that you're dead oh like just stomped yeah a force field there he found the pixel holy crap are these like the shortest levels oh yeah oh this one has a force field so it's a little harder to snipe well until oh my god no what wait how do you not get hit there's enough away there's a bug where sometimes you can get through a tripwire that should have killed you what wait yep wait there's no collision next to that the molding around that does not have collision so you just walk through it wow that completely ruins the levels yeah it makes it better it's faster yeah i mean you have to kind of see through the matrix in order to do this look at this we we starve you no book of life at the beginning it's about the journey of of getting the book again i always assume that oh well you do that instead how do you do it through the window there must be no collision there or something right yeah wow that was like ten percent of the level yeah well i mean i just assumed that there was always gonna be a way that the the hole you got there from you'd be able to like turn around and zoom back into that room but it turns out you just go straight through the window yeah oh that's a massive cool level just kidding yeah absolutely obliterated and like russell you set up these trip fires like it'll definitely kill you if you try to skip this way yeah and people figured out a way to like direct influence their direction and here's the final boss yeah the little screeching enemy guys are kind of a light edition of like the way they work i think right but they're super cool yeah they kind of like chase you around they're like kind of an enemy that explodes when they touch you but also they they are meant to be like fodder for teleporting onto oh my god just click really fast yeah this boss turned out really well you did like ninety nine point nine percent of your event it's like super cool level yeah i like made it like a really long time ago and then like late in the game i i refreshed it so it's still not that different than it was wow just just just do it why not just break all the crystals well i mean that's what we asked them to do just you know you could just take a break in between the crystals yeah oh yeah you can just walk to this one instead of going the normal path yeah that was intentional yeah that was that was one of the few intentional shortcuts in this life remember how many phases we wanted to add to the end of this wow yeah we wanted it to be longer but you know it's a pretty long fight anyway here we go that was the world record huh that's pretty good what did you guys think the world record time would be 10 minutes i thought it was going to be closer to an hour but uh anyway yeah that was that was that was pretty amazing and it looks like there's even more time to save in the future yeah there's a lot of really risky strats you can try like the individual level times are probably all much lower so eventually someone will probably just go completely psychotic really really exciting yeah but yeah so cool well thanks for thanks for joining and watching the speedrun and hope hope people found some of our commentary interesting well yeah that's all [Music] [Music] you

Channel: IGN

Views: 364,085

Keywords: neon white speedrun, neon white pc gameplay, neon white high level gameplay, neon white guide, neon white speedrun guide, neon white pc speedrun, neon white switch, neon white mouse and keyboard speedrun, neon white world record, neon white speedrun gameplay, neon white, neon white annapurna, annapurna interactive, speedruns, neon white gameplay, nintendo switch, switch, first-person, annapurna, steam, first person shooter, new video games, new games 2022, devs react

Id: MmmXw2n8nec

Length: 39min 46sec (2386 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 02 2022