Submission #8369: Cephla's Genesis Misplaced in 09:29.78

Misplaced is a 2019 Genesis puzzle homebrew game featuring Hara who wakes up on a small strange island somewhere in the clouds every day. Every day is the same. Hara must place red dots scattered across the islands in holes to spawn keys that will lead to the next island. This TAS uses his ability to create strange paths to advance through all islands in under 10 minutes.

Finally knocked another one out I've had sitting for almost a year. The premise is simple: get all red dots into all holes (except for one level where you somehow have to guess which 4 holes are correct) to spawn a key and get to the next level. On the islands are Hatter and Pirate who provide more information about the game but also sometimes block paths unless you talk to them (more on that later). Hara has an ability to draw paths without being limited by the position of enemies or rather enemy hitboxes are disabled during the path drawing mode. As long as the endpoint is on solid ground and the path doesn't go through any walls, Hara can use the drawn path to cross air which is its biggest use. The shortest paths possible are drawn to ensure as few steps are taken.

Being developed by RetroSouls, this game has two versions: one in English and one in Russian. I did some timings and thankfully English came out as the faster language by 37 frames.

If you thought the enemies were being nice in this TAS, you'd be very correct. Without manipulating them, they get in the way a lot. Thankfully, manipulation is very easy, just press a random button and hope the right enemy moves away from you. There were some more things I did notice, for example enemies seem to move in 2 or 3 space intervals before either continuing in their current direction or changing. Manipulation also only worked while not in drawing mode, but I only really noticed something like this during the level with lots of one space wide platforms with continuous retracing so that may not be true.

There are some levels where Hatter (or Pirate) block the path and are solid until talked to. Obviously, talking to them is slow so we need some way to get past them. Thankfully, they don't count as walls so a path through them is valid. This can't be done everywhere, though, since there sometimes isn't enough space to draw a path or for one instance is just slower to draw lines through them.

The biggest improvements would come from route changes. The one level I know could be improved but can't think of a way to is the one with one wide platforms in a grid with Hatter blocking one path. I also noticed towards the end of making this that the conversations at the start were slightly suboptimal. After fixing this, I saved a couple frames but the entire movie desynced and ended up losing more time than I saved so I just left it in. Any improvements are a bit scary, especially at the start since pressing just one button for one frame can completely throw the entire TAS, mostly through enemy manipulation which is fixable but also lag frames which is arguably even more devastating.

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: Replacing movie file with a 1467 frame improvement.

nymx: As I was looking at the original movie, nothing really popped out at me as an obvious mistake. Big thanks to Alyosha for the findings.

As for the submission, looks good and great job!

Accepting to "Standard" for publication.

despoa: Processing...