First TAS I end up completing after being made a judge and of course I end up doing something kinda dumb. Sorry about that.
Introduction
Ottos Ottifanten: Baby Brunos Apltraum, also known as Baby Bruno's Nightmare but will be shortened to BBA from now on for convenience, was a 1998 video grame developed by Bit Managers and published by Infogrames. The gameplay concept originally developed in 1993 as a The Adventures of Pinocchio, based on the public domain fairy tale version, but Infogrames shelved it as it wasn't based on a known license. When the Ottifanten license was acquired, Bit Managers took the original Pinocchio prototype and reworked it quite a bit in such a way that they do play very differently.
I was originally made attention to this when Smight and authorblues made The Adventures of Pinocchio the July 2022 grame of the month to focus on. It lead me to see the rejected submission of the prototype version for not being different enough from BBA. After having watched both world record RTA runs of both grames I believe they are different enough to be considered different grames with TASes that can be published alongside each other. The only way I could make some proof of that was to TAS it. While possibly a foolish endeavor, it's probably one of the best ways to make concrete comparisons between the 1993 prototype and the 1998 release.
Run notes
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.8
- Gambatte core
- Some RNG manipulation
Mechanics, techniques, and version differences
This will also cover some version differences when relevant. The levels themselves are mostly understandable from watching the TAS after reading this section.
Map size
In Pinocchio the map floor is an 8x8 grid. This was done with small grid tiles, objects, and sprites. In BBA, all the elements in stages were made larger with more detail. As such, the HUD was heavily shrunk down and the map floor was reduced to a 7x7 grid. Losing about 25% of available floor space does affect how some levels are approached between the versions because map distances and movement cycles are affected by the map shrinkage. This makes any maps similar between the two have skips that are only doable in one version or the other.
Jump startup and landing recovery
In BBA, Bruno has a frame of startup for jumping so that is minimized when possible to save time. Landing also has a frame of recovery so trying to avoid excessive landing is also utilized to save frames.
Enemy RNG
Hostile enemies come in 3 types:
- Enemies that travel a set path or behavior
- Enemies that chase the player when touching the ground at the same level as them
- Enemies with random movement
The third type is the one most affected by RNG and are sometimes manipulated to get past them. The main one I managed to figure out was that they can be influenced by if a direction is held.
Objects and their usage
In BBA, there are now more items than the pushable block and the block that can be taken in Pinocchio. The items are as follows:
- Small block
- This is a small block that can be taken and placed down below the player when on ground. This is taken from Pinocchio.
- Large block
- This is a large block that can be pushed around but cannot be lifted. This is also taken from Pinocchio.
- Milk bottle
- Grabbing enough of these will grant an extra life.
- Bomb
- This is a multi-use item that explodes and destroys certain objects, but not Bruno unless he touches the explosion, after 50 in-game time units.
- Invincibility scroll
- Grabbing this scroll will make Bruno invincible to all damaging objects in a level.
- Speed scroll
- Grabbing this scroll will boost Bruno's speeds by quite a bit, allowing more evasive maneuvers around enemies and obstacles.
The addition of items to BBA introduces a new and intentional mechanic that gets utilized throughout this TAS. All of these are considered platforms while they're around. This leads to skips that weren't possible in Pinocchio such as using milk or bombs to jump over otherwise fatal obstacles. These objects can also be placed on top of hostile enemies to ride on top of them, which is also an intended mechanic due to a late grame level requiring the use of that technique.
Lag management
When there are multiple sprites on screen in BBA the grame tends to lag a lot, which is incredibly frustrating for something that already polls inputs every 4 frames at the fastest. Sometimes extra items are grabbed or directional changes are minimized to reduce lag. Placing down a bomb also generates a frame of lag.
Directional movement
This is probably the biggest difference between Pinocchio and BBA. I intentionally saved this one for last for a specific reason.
In Pinocchio, the player was allowed 8 way movement which made taking diagonals a quick way to solve levels. The cardinals also got the benefit of having the speed of both diagonals. In BBA, the player is locked to the 4 diagonal directions without cardinal movement.
To me, this one seems to be a deliberate change by Bit Managers rather than an oversight of the prototype version. The reduced screen size and the fact that items could be used as platforms would mean that having diagonal movement would make skips, both deliberate and unintentional, easier to pull off. With the level design for later stages being more puzzle oriented it would make sense for them to remove 8 way movement so the player can more deliberately focus on how to approach some levels.
Possible improvements
- Better lag and RNG management is probably the biggest one. There was a posted input file done by feos and Samsara that I only found after being a chunk of the way through my TAS. I did beat their times in every level except level 17 by 2 frames due to what was probably bad lag and RNG.
- There might be some faster level paths that I might not have caught since I mostly referenced the one RTA run for BBA on SRC.
Special thanks
- The Cutting Room Floor for the info about the prototype
- Baruch, Jigwally, and CasualPokePlayer for their TASes of The Adventures of Pinocchio
- Chancool for having an RTA speed run that I could reference
- feos and Samsara for having an input file that I could check to see if I was on the right track on optimization
- This dumb tweet for why I've been typing grames this whole submission
Suggested screenshot
Frame 37472: Bruno jumping off a box that's on top of a wizard to reach the exit
Samsara: Jrudging.
Samsara: Watching this along with the matching Pinocchio submission from a couple years back was a really interesting experience in terms of just how much a prototype and a final release can differ just from graphics and gameplay tweaks. In some ways, Ottifanten feels more like a spiritual sequel than a finished release.
Judging it is the easy part of this little experience, of course. This is the finished grame, it has been acceptable for quite a while, although at the time of Pinocchio's judgement we had determined that this run would obsolete the published Pinocchio run. Things are different now! Now we're not even accepting this one! Wait, no, that was a bit. The acceptability of this run doesn't change, but it gets to stand on its own while Pinocchio can be its own separate thing. At the risk of having this judgement be more about Pinocchio than the TAS it's supposed to be judging, I recommend reading the new judgement on Pinocchio for a little more information and backstory on this whole weird prototype situation.
Accepting!
fsvgm777: Processing.