Submission #10761: DigitalDuck's ZXS Transylvanian Castle in 06:41.097

Transylvanian Castle Dx2 is a relatively simple dungeon crawler. Professor Van Helsing has been inflicted with a curse, and must defeat Dracula and escape his castle within three days.

This is a tool-assisted speedrun of Transylvanian Castle Dx2 for the ZX Spectrum. It completes the any% category, completing the game as quickly as possible.

TAS timing (power on until last input): 20087 frames, 6:41.579

RTA timing (press a button to start the game until unlocking the door): 5458 frames, 1:49.116

The run is performed on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2A. Transylvanian Castle Dx2 does not attempt to control its framerate, it simply processes the game as quickly as it can at all times. 128K versions of the Spectrum run their Z80 processor at a slightly higher clock rate, and the +2A and +3 also have some improvements in memory access speeds. As a result, the game runs fastest on these models. The +3 is a disk-based system, and Transylvanian Castle Dx2 has never been officially released on disk, so the run uses the +2A and loads the game from tape.

The castle is a procedurally generated maze with a high braid value. Van Helsing always enters from the bottom left, and dead ends are only created to contain major enemies. Every time a room is entered, an hour passes, and there's a strict 72 hour time limit.

There are four major enemies that may be present: Dracula (defeated with hammer-stick), Werewolf (defeated with silver dagger), Mummy (defeated with Amon-Ra staff), and Frankenstein's monster (defeated with battery). Dracula will always be present, and will always be guarding the castle key, but any or all of the remaining major enemies can appear at random. Each additional major enemy will be guarding the item that defeats the previously added major enemy; the item to defeat the last major enemy added will be somewhere else in the castle.

Every remaining room, apart from the starting room, contains both a minor enemy and an item. The enemy must be defeated before taking the item or moving to an unvisited room. When fighting a random enemy, player's attack is compared against enemy's protect and vice versa, and damage is dealt to each side. The player's attack always takes precedence.

Minor enemies:

Energy:

Attack:

Protect:

The game only rolls RNG while on the title screen, when starting a game, and when attacking an enemy. The seed is otherwise fixed, which effectively means that the only real RNG manipulation that can be done is on the title screen. We manipulate a Dracula-only maze with a relatively short path to Dracula, where the hammer-stick is on the path, and with an early weapon and shield to minimise battle time. With that in place we simply beeline to Dracula and back again.

Transylvanian Castle Dx2 is an interesting game. The procedural generation is very basic and it's often impossible to complete due to high-level enemies blocking progress. But this isn't much of an issue if you're playing the game casually, as it's a very short and replayable game - just go again.

Special thanks go to Siyei Er for making the game, Sir Clive Sinclair for making the Spectrum, and everyone in the Speedtrum Specrunning community for keeping da speccy alive.