Submission #8132: Tegron's Linux Project Kat - Paper Lily Prologue "Dead End K2 - Cold Kat Feet" in 01:54.40

TAS chooses the Japanese version for one reason, which we will get to in a moment, the game is running v1.3.1 thanks to the community who submitted this old version for speedruns because it is faster than the newer ones from v1.3.2+

I would like to mention that this is my first attempts at doing TAS so some things may be a bit inaccurate

There are 8 endings in this game of which one is True End, in this TAS I choose the second ending and pass in the shortest time possible

Garden is the kind of Tutorial where the game tells you how to control, interact with something, collect objects etc..., we just keep going straight and skip the tutorials, the second one shows how to interact so we open the door and keep going straight, the third one shows how to interact with objects, you don't have to pick a flower but it's quicker, we move on and the fourth tutorial shows how to use objects, there are two choices on how to finish Garden, we can take the flowers out of the vase and interact with the door or put the flower in the vase, putting the flower in the vase is quicker which saves time

We're going to talk about the lyrics because it's important to tell, there's a bit of a long scene where we have to skip the lyrics, a quicker way is to hold X for auto-skip and mash because it's much faster to scroll through the lyrics than just hold X or mash, we're getting closer to the Occult club and it's the "YOU'RE MAKING TOO MUCH NOICE" dialogue that you have to wait for to scroll to the end, the Japanese version does it faster by over 0.66X while in English it scrolls by 3.35X, it saves over 2 seconds in TAS, then I scroll the rest of the texts

After all the texts, we choose from the Inventory Ritual Notes, the reason I choose is because you can't leave the Occult Club if you don't look at them, we leave the Occult Club, go straight down to the stairs, interact with them 2 times and choose the first option and we scroll to the end of the dialogues and we have the 2nd ending

You're not prepared to deal with the truth...are you?

A mysterious golden letter is sent to a select number of people... Its contents are unknown.

Project Kat is a story-based puzzle game created by Leef6010, where each puzzle has multiple solutions and outcomes! There is always another way. The game is playable in about 45 minutes and contains multiple endings depending on your actions.

This is the prologue to Paper Lily, the full game, but it is also a standalone story that can be enjoyed on its own.

feos: Claiming for judging.

feos: People in the submission thread said that this run is unoptimized, and I wanted to see for myself, which brought me to a rabbit hole and taught me that tasing this game is a nightmare.

CasualPokePlayer got it to sync, but I never did. libTAS setting cited as helpful is "Recycle threads", though the game kept crashing under some unclear circumstances. Spikestuff posted a quicker movie and I never got it to sync either. But I tried to resync it with "Runtime > Time Tracking > clock_gettime() monotonic" which makes the game a tiny bit more consistent, and it just kept crashing so I couldn't do much. Savestates crash too.

It was mentioned that interim builds of libTAS work better, and in theory we can do unofficial releases of emulators for specific submissions, so there's a build they sync on. I tried to switch to interim libTAS to try this game, and during the process of creating a .deb package for it my VM died.

I didn't want to reject this movie without some kind of a resolution on how to do it properly, because with libTAS 1.4.4 it's nearly impossible to TAS this game. But further testing is going to take some time now.

In principle, this branch could to to Playground even though it doesn't reach the credits, and an "all endings" branch sounds perfectly acceptable as a full completion category, alongside a true ending branch that just completes the game the fastest.

Older game version is technically not a big deal even though the community has to host it on its own (since it's free anyway), while itch.io version gets regularly updated and doesn't host older builds (and the Steam version which may have older builds available is Windows only). It's not uncommon for us to ask game developers to add older versions to downloads though, so it might be a good idea in this case.

Overall this is a cool game and I'd like to provide a bit of tech help with TASing it, though this particular attempt is not up to par just yet, even though it's still a bit faster than the current human record.