Guidelines

Guidelines for players

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Guidelines for players

This page details those guidelines that one should strive for to make a TAS that is appealing to the audience. Note that “audience” in this context refers to the general TAS-watching audience, and expectations are higher than they seem at first.

Planning guidelines

Be aware.

Do not undertake a TAS job alone, not if you can help it. Seek help from the Internet. Search for everything that matters: tricks, routes, maps, charts, bugs and existing records. Ask about it on relevant forums (but search first). It is recommended to play through a game at least once to understand how it works.

Do not forget that the tips you find in Internet are aimed for players who play on a real console. When you are making a tool-assisted movie, you can often do things the best players do not do because it is too risky. Always consider new routes. Some routes might not work without extreme luck or skill. Do not follow walkthroughs blindly.

Use the best tools possible to make the TAS. Never handicap yourself.

Always view existing runs (speedruns, TAS, any) before and while doing yours. Always compare your run to the current best run. If you are aiming for speed and you fail to beat existing speed records, your movie will be rejected. See Rules.

Probe the game. Try, observe, and learn how it calculates things, and use the data to your advantage. Remember, it is only a computer program, and computer programs are predictable.

Select your game well

Vaguely speaking, not every game in existence is good. Similarly, not all games have potential for entertaining TASes from a viewer standpoint. Select those games which give you a chance to make a TAS that entertains viewers. Just because a game is popular, difficult, or is entertaining to play or run or TAS, does not necessarily mean that it is entertaining to watch.

If a game is a good game to TAS, it should be possible to adhere to the guidelines:

The game should give an impression of complexity; it should not be overly easy or straightforward.
There should be enough variety to entertain. It should not have, say, 10% of it entertaining and 90% boring.
It should not be too long.
A TAS of the game can be distinguished enough from a non-assisted run.
It should not be unimpressive (for example, a chess TAS is often unimpressive).
It should be able to have clear goals such as completion.
It should not be a bad game in the first place, such that it distracts the viewers.

As an example of a bad game choice, see Front Line (this example is not an intention to mock anyone, as the author not only acknowledges how bad it is, but enjoys such fact).

Select your goals well

Choose goals that will make the run entertaining. For most games, a “fastest at any cost” mentality is best (short of using passwords, saves, or cheats). For fighting games, autoscrollers, and scoring games, it is usually better to show off as many combos and tricks as possible, instead of going for fastest time.

You are permitted to trade off speed for entertainment, if you want to. Make it so that the speed loss is not obvious to the viewer. Use this with caution.

Examples of other goals that have been popular are pacifist, no damage, all items (usually called 100%), no warps, or runs with a slower character. Not using a specific bug which lets you end the game very quickly can make for an interesting movie, which shows more of the game. The point is that whatever goals you choose, it should look impressive.

Always stay within your goals. For example, if you say that you will obtain all items, obtain all items. Goals must be clear and objective; they must not be vague.

Do not impose artificial restrictions on the run. Such as “No usage of this particular weapon”, “Both high score and fast time” (how should we compare that run to a future one?), or “No jumping except where necessary”. It is possible to set auxiliary goals, such as “as high a score as possible without wasting time”, but, as stated, it must not interfere with the primary goal of fastest completion.

Please note that we do not accept an indefinite number of variants for any given game. Any more than 3 for a game is very uncommon. Most games have only one movie, simply going as fast as possible with any means. A handful of games also have a movie which shows more of the game, such as no warps, or 100% items, or without a glitch that takes you straight to the end.

TASing guidelines

Be quick

Do not wait for anything if you can help it. If there is an enemy in the way, find a way to kill it, or go around or through it, without stopping. Minimize lag caused by large numbers of sprites and/or CPU-intensive calculations by killing enemies (although sometimes it is better not to).

If it is faster to take damage (for example, by running into an enemy instead of going around it or trying to kill it), take damage. As a stylistic consideration, you may choose to take no damage whenever taking damage saves time, in order to make the run look better. In either case, be consistent in always taking damage to save time or taking no damage. Do not take damage if you can avoid it without wasting time (see “Be interesting” below).

It is the same issue concerning using death to save time.

Create art even when waiting.

A TASer is an author. Do not do the obvious and always stand still when forced to wait; jump around, do special moves, dance to the music, or do something to make the delay less boring. Keep the actions in moderation, however; doing a lot of random and meaningless actions looks stupid and is worse than standing still^[1]. Do not overuse actions.

This applies also to auto-scrolling levels where you can entertain the audience instead of just staying at the front of the screen. See the Super Mario 3 video for a perfect example.

Do something unexpected.

This section is not an invitation to do something stupid. It is an invitation to do things beyond the conventional.

Be different. Take faster routes or shortcuts that no one takes, whether undesirable or impossible in real play. If you think of a route that seems blocked but would speed up your play significantly, find out how to go through, over or under it. If you want some radical shortcut or strategy to happen, find out how to make it happen.

If something that relies on chance usually does not happen, make it happen. The game is only as random as you are. For example, you can win lotteries, deliver critical hits, and make bosses behave how you want them to behave. Take care, as the game is flexible only to a certain extent. See Luck Manipulation for how to do this.

Be interesting.

If you have the choice, try to do things in a more impressive way than the easy way. If enemies are hard to kill, kill them. If an object is hard to miss, miss it. If you can avoid taking damage without wasting time, do so. However, avoid repeating the same stunts too much.

In games that have a user-controllable camera that does not affect the actual playing, try to control the camera so that it provides the most interesting or beautiful angles at all time instead of going with default settings.

Be accurate.

Be accurate in everything. Do not miss your target and do not use more shots than necessary, since that is seen to be sloppy. Do not overkill a boss with a visible health bar if you can avoid it without wasting time; do only enough damage to kill it.

Push actions to the limit. If you can destroy a target as soon or as late as possible without losing time, do so. If you can make your jumps as short as possible without losing time, do so. Do not have slow reactions; act as soon as possible.

Be determined.

Be sure that every movement you do has a meaningful purpose. If you have to backtrack to fix your mistakes (forgetting an item or something like that), undo the whole wandering. Fix mistakes when you can with reasonable effort. Do not leave them in; it will cause problems later.

Do not sleep. You are supposed to be the master of the game, not the slave of the game. Aim for the impossible. Think outside the box and do not give up if your ideas do not work right away. Just because you cannot get something to work right away does not mean that it is not possible.

TAS records always appear unbeatable before you try to beat them. So try to beat them.

“Guidelines” not to follow

The following are “guidelines” that some people feel they should strive for. They are not guidelines at all, and should not be followed.

False: The fewer rerecords, the better.

Ultimately, we (the TAS audience) are only concerned with how the TAS appears. We do not care about the number of rerecords used in the making of the movie. Despite being a header stat, the number of rerecords is only used for side information.

If you aim to minimize the number of rerecords, it will most likely be visible in your result as sloppiness. There is no consideration for low-rerecord TASes. There is not even interest for such, as it is pointless^[2].

Surprisingly, “The more rerecords, the better” is not always true, though it tends to be. Do not pay attention to the number of rerecords: go only by how good the movie looks upon watching it.

We do favor skill-type measures such as does not take damage and plays at hardest difficulty - these make the movie entertaining to watch.
How you made the movie is not open for consideration. Always use the best possible methods you can use to produce the best possible result. Your movie will be judged the same way regardless of the methods you used to make it.

False: The more of something, the better.

Goals are objective. There is no compromise. Either achieve your goals, or do not waste your time.

If you are going for fastest completion, do not lose time showing off just because you feel like it, or lose time getting unnecessary items (unless you have the goal of getting all items), or give up time for little effect. Viewers will often find the run more interesting if you simply adhere to the guidelines. Speed-for-entertainment tradeoffs are permitted, but only for relatively little, unnoticeable time loss and relatively large entertainment returns.

Do not make lame (artificial) goals, such as “No running” or “Get exactly 8 of 16 items”. Those types of goals only increase redundancy.

False: The more popular the game is, the better it is to run.

Even among the most popular games, some games are simply not suitable for TASing. See “Select your game well” earlier in this page. Remember that the audience watches your movie instead of playing the game.

That said, it is possible that if a game is popular, it will receive more viewer feedback, usually from those who have gameplay experience. Even then, some games that are popular are so highly contested that it is very difficult to improve.

[1]: Wobbling nervously is stupid. (Bisqwit’s opinion)

[2]: Unassisted speedruns may be interesting in themselves, although they are apart from the main purpose of this site. The speedrun competition forum has discussion on those.