User Files from Exonym

Further improvements to Secret Cliff.

39 frames saved in secret cliff over the last video I posted in discord. Also, avoided taking a death on the boss so I saved all 3 lanterns, both of which cost 0 frames to pick up. Slightly better cloud management but still not convinced it's 100% optimal. Lost a few frames from having less boost from the moving platform section in secret cliff, but overall gained. Couldn't pick up the spear head powerup from the robot that drops it in the first room because the rocks in the next room would fall in unfavorable patterns.

Saved 10 frames on final boss by using all of the wave attacks before the final punch of phase 1 rather than at the end of phase 1

WIP of first 2 levels. Lag management is a huge part of the game, and upon beating the second boss I realized the game has randomized levels, so will need to do some research to see if the level order matters...

Notes: each health node missing in your health bar counts up 8 frames as it refills health after beating a boss. The wave attack art costs 2 points and each shot saves 40 frames on a boss, pretty important to max that out before reaching boss, even more so than health.

34 frames over 1-1. Better manipulation of flying enemy could save a couple of frames too, potentially

various improvements over last file. Submission this weekend if nothing else is found

Holding off on submitting for a few days in case something else is found, but this is the pretty much complete TAS of this game.

improved boss fight by 59 frames by utilizing a turnaround trick which creates a large hitbox behind fred. The boss moves based on the direction fred is facing when taking damage, so we can abuse this and get 3 shortened i-frame animations by stopping him in the middle of the room.

Also included the initial run of the first part of the next stage, synced back up nicely which means this game is rather edit friendly at least so far.

I did find the basic values such as x camera position, x position relative to the camera and something related to animation cycles in the RAM. Did not do any hard digging for boss hp values or such.

Mainly for this I just used prince_leaf's fastest TAS on youtube as a reference point but without an actual input file I have no idea if I was faster or slower than what he did.

Haven't really found anything substantial, there is a slight glitch where the water death animation can slide along the moving platform and then over the crocodile and into the wall but you still die anyway.

This is just a quick test, everything seems relatively sync friendly at least up til the first boss. Only one jump height, annoyingly.

Did a test run to see how the parasol numbers would line up, so that I can plan the route better later.

-Didn't include a strat of killing the first boss a few frames sooner by jumping on it until I saw MESHUGGAH's wip later.

-stage 1 is pretty much perfect, no lag and no tricks to really speed up anything since it's all horizontal.

-you can jump off enemies as long as you land on them just right and it doesnt slow you down. This can sometimes be useful for making certain jumps or jumping off the rock in stage 2. You still have to be on the right half of the screen to progress, that's why the backtrack. Still needs to be optimized.

-you can alter your jumps slightly by letting go of A for a bit, and you seem to be able to jump sooner after landing if you have the above parasol out, not sure why this is but it seems useful for vertical stages. Though sometimes it can cause lag so it's a big trial and error on when to use it?

-Got lazier the further into the run I went as it was just a rough draft, most notably would be lag reduction.

-Didn't find any way to break out of the whale's suction in order to reach his mouth faster.

-3rd beanstalk puts you the furthest right in the above cloud level despite the fact that it's the slowest vine to climb. (1862 frames compared to the fastest which was stalk 2 at 1796) The amount that it puts you ahead is so great that these don't really matter.

-final boss takes 30 hits so that many parasols must be preserved. He can be killed entirely off screen but must wait for him to bounce down before he's actually dead. There is a line of dialogue at the end that must be skipped so unfortunately we can't end input early here.