First attempt at creating a TAS for Stick RPG Complete, an old flash game hosted by xgen studios.
Stick RPG Complete has the character taking on the role of a stickman, you start out in a small apartment and are set loose to explore and make money and a name for yourself.
Of course, the fastest way to become president is by gambling... right?
Warning, screen flashes repeatedly after the 3 minute mark.
Game objectives
Recorded and played back using libTAS v1.4.4 commit #3ad78262
Emulator used: Ruffle 2023 08 28
Rules are based on the 100% category for this game on speedrun.com
Get the skateboard from the kid
Kill the kid
Become CEO
Buy out the shops
Buy all real estate
Hotwire the yellow car
Earn the red sports car
Become Dictator OR President
Comments
To start off, we go to the casino right away to gamble on the roulette wheel.
RNG is predicted and manipulated so that we always win a 35:1 payout every time the ball lands in the roulette.
After making copious amounts of cash, we move over to the pawn shop across the street and buy everything they have available.
The only useful item here really is the alarm clock, as it gives us extra time in the morning.
Right next door is a convenience store that sells smokes, it's the only item here that we really need.
Moving forwards from here, we go back to the bank to buy real estate, stopping to give the kid 10 packs of smokes.
The kid gives us a skateboard, and then dies from smoke inhalation, this drops your character's karma.
Stopping at the furniture store we buy everything they have then go home.
At home we invest in stocks (a bad one, admittedly) and go back to the casino.
Stop at home to sleep, go buy more furniture, the castle, then right back home.
Next is sleeping repeatedly to increase our stats so they're high enough to hotwire the car outside.
After sleeping once more, we stop at the hobo to give him money to increase our karma above 0.
More sleeping, dump the rest of our money into the stock while it's tanked, and more sleeping.
Then we go out once more to become CEO, and return home to run our presidential campaign.
Once that's done, we're done, pull up the status menu and end time.
Other comments
The run is fairly simple, I was going for the 100% category and since most of the game is predominantly menuing, there was potential for huge time saves compared to RTA.
I used some predictions with the RNG to make a large amount of money very quickly, however by exploiting this in combination with the bank there's potential to make way more than I did in less time. (Estimated time save about 2 minutes)
Also thank you to Randomno for helping with the encoded video!
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6341
Location: The land down under.
Flashing at 3:00 to 3:46 and again at 3:52 to 3:55 and finally 3:56 to 4:03 and lastly 4:06 to 4:46 and for good measure 4:49 to 4:50.
I guess my only complaint-- besides the seizure. Is that it looks like you overgrinded at the Casino. Probably something that can be simply patched.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
Joined: 8/26/2023
Posts: 7
Location: Valley of the Sun
Spikestuff wrote:
Flashing at 3:00 to 3:46 and again at 3:52 to 3:55 and finally 3:56 to 4:03 and lastly 4:06 to 4:46 and for good measure 4:49 to 4:50.
I guess my only complaint-- besides the seizure. Is that it looks like you overgrinded at the Casino. Probably something that can be simply patched.
My routing has some room for improvements. I'm going to put a warning on the video and the post about the flashing, cause yeah, it's definitely way worse when it's not a tenth of your monitor.
Now that libTAS and Ruffle are working on my WSL2 installation (I had to build libTAS since I didn't know there were nightly releases until I had already run make) I want to work on making a more complex run. Maybe not of Stick RPG necessarily, however this was really fun to work on.
Places that could be the biggest time saves (that I didn't really want to touch because of the rng) is less time spent at the casino. After making 70,000 it's not too unreasonable to warp back home and deposit money at the bank and ride the 2% interest.
Could possibly shave a few seconds with less sleeping as well but casino is definitely the biggest time block.
I loved this game when I was a kid, very cool to see it as a TAS! I think that considering how fast the player can sleep, putting $70,000 in the bank and using the interest rate is faster than betting it in the casino. If the interest rate is 2%, you'll double your money in only 35 days. I'm curious what the route would be for the game mode with only 100 days to play, so that you can't just sleep for years to level up your stats.
Joined: 8/26/2023
Posts: 7
Location: Valley of the Sun
Chamale wrote:
I loved this game when I was a kid, very cool to see it as a TAS! I think that considering how fast the player can sleep, putting $70,000 in the bank and using the interest rate is faster than betting it in the casino. If the interest rate is 2%, you'll double your money in only 35 days. I'm curious what the route would be for the game mode with only 100 days to play, so that you can't just sleep for years to level up your stats.
The only issue is that the interest rate decreases over time, my brother suggested possibly using stocks to multiply the deposited cash by theoretically up to a factor of 10. Eventually the interest rate drops to zero and is no longer an effective method of making cash.
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6341
Location: The land down under.
Right. Things that I've noticed and unfortunately can't fix.
The major issue is (and why I can't fix it) is your framerate's wrong. The game runs at 35fps not 30fps.
The second issue is when you're doing your generative stats you could muck around with System Time instead and see if that gives you anything close to preferable as a starting stat.
Mucking around and setting the System Time to 28 gave me 5 / 9 / 10 with 9 Extra Points. Which when used can give me 9 / 10 / 14, similar to what you have but with an extra stat in Intelligence.
However this also brings to question of "isn't it better to even all these out to the same stat if you're going to sleep grind +1 to get the stats you need, and the lowest having the most issue?" this is due to the job hunt being done at the end of the movie and the stats requirement of being President being at or above 666.
Your naming input, something I generally personally ignore can be fixed up.
Now I don't know why this first part doesn't work in Linux, but it works in Windows. You can do Ctrl+A and redo that instead of manually backspacing 8 characters.
But, if you have a look at Don't Shit Your Pants or Thy Dungeonman input string can be done in one line, meaning in theory you can have all that backspace in a single line, but also the rest of your alias "[A]hym" be done in that same single frame instead of it being spaced out along with that Done input. This affects any time you manually put in cash for stocks.
Spikestuff wrote:
It looks like you overgrinded at the Casino. Probably something that can be simply patched.
To refer to this comment. Doing all the necessary gambling you have to do once is better than backtracking and completing it a second time.
If you know how much money you need at early game in a single trip, it's better to aim for that instead.
I voted Meh previously mainly for the downtime sections being flashing lights, but if I could now I would Abstain the vote if I knew what I learnt.
This is a good opener of a Submission but much more can be done fixed, patched and understood upon for this title.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
Joined: 8/26/2023
Posts: 7
Location: Valley of the Sun
Thank you for the feedback, there's definitely much room for improvement you are right. However the one thing I can't get over myself is the framerate being wrong, as you said. Exiftools confirms this fact. Also the flashing would be even worse at a higher framerate so personally I don't see myself revisiting this game to improve it. The flashing is already bad enough
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6341
Location: The land down under.
Done from scratch: User movie #638298571590604477.
Thanks to rythin for proving a more preferable System Time. This won't be submitted in its current state as it's not the best that can be dealt with.
For example if I even out my points where I should've biased towards Strength and Intelligence making it a 10/14/14 this would've removed 4 sleeps.
One last thing I noticed between this and yours is that there's one more thing that could've been done.
At the roulette table you select the number, then spin. It's faster to spin then select the number.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
