Pause Ahead is a “jumping-and-pausing” platforming game released by Askiisoft Games in 2013. As its own official description says, “Pause through the caves until you reach the ending”.
Like Tower of Heaven, the game hides three secret collectibles within its levels. Unlike Tower of Heaven, however, collecting them also unlocks an alternate final room, called Nihil, and a different ending. This submission aims to reach this ending and complete it as fast as possible.
Mechanics
Accelerating to maximum speed from a standstill takes 10 frames, and like ToH, turning immediately sets your speed to 0 (which then gets one frame of acceleration applied). Jumping also works in a similar fashion. The game implements coyote time by having a timer of about 10 frames after you leave ground where you’re still considered grounded, and as such gravity is not applied. This is why I jump before every single fall when possible, as otherwise I’d have to wait for gravity to kick in.
Pausing is where the game reveals its true intentions and some unique interactions. To the best of my understanding:
- Pausing preserves your horizontal and vertical speed. No acceleration or gravity is applied while paused.
- Pausing preserves your aerial/grounded state before the pause even if you touch ground while paused
- Objects such as saw blades, thwomps, spikes and collectibles do not check collision while the game is paused.
Pause/unpause inputs are processed before all other inputs. This allows us to jump the same frame we unpause. The game has three assigned pause buttons (C and both Shift keys by default) and they’re processed separately, so it is possible to pause for as little as one frame by tapping two different pause keys in consecutive frames.
In what is the pausing quirk that I get the least, we can control vertical speed on unpause by holding up, and preserve maximum speed by not holding up at all during the unpause frame. I use this liberally during the movie to adjust vertical positioning despite having no idea why it happens.
Routing
Most of the routing is fairly straightforward. We aim to optimize movement for maximum speed preservation whenever possible, prioritizing vertical speed as it is generally harder to build up.
In level 7, we’re forced to pause slightly earlier than we’d like in order to avoid dying to a mini thwomp. As such, we pause in the middle to gain horizontal speed again, which we then preserve via pausing for the rest of the level.
Level 8 includes a late unpause to avoid touching the ground and being put in Coyote time, which would delay getting to the exit door.
As early as Level 9, we run into a significant optimization hurdle: objects that move while the game is unpaused. Since pausing early could be favorable to keep objects in good locations but would interfere with building speed, there was a lot of trial and error to find good combinations of pauses and unpauses.
The door in level 13 is timer based, and as such I have no option but to wait for it to open.
Each level in Pause Ahead has a countdown timer that kills the player if it reaches below zero. This time only advances when the game is not paused, and forces us to pause for extended periods of time on level 14 and forward. Hourglasses can extend this time limit, but most levels do not actually require them.
Nihil, the final level, requires us to get to the guillotines on each side at the bottom and die on each. As such, this room forces two deaths in the movie and is the only room that must be beaten twice. Movement is heavily constrained due to the tight spaces and movement speed was difficult to build for both sides.
The game finishes with an IGT of 2:24, and a Nihil time of 0:44. I use IGT for comparison as the RTA runs utilize the built-in speedrun mode, which removes all dialogue and times to the same IGT. For comparison, the equivalent RTA WR is 3:01 IGT.
ThunderAxe31: Claiming for judging.
ThunderAxe31: File replaced with a 114 frames improvement.
ThunderAxe31: At first, I was wondering if this movie could be superseded by an "all achievements" movie, since that would include reaching this alternate ending... but after seeing that among the in-game achievements there is one about waiting for 1 hour, well, I don't think it would make much sense to consider that for full completion. Maybe something more like all secrets&trinkets?
In this movie, most of the game is cleared, but before accessing the boss fight, the player takes a different route instead, that leads to an alternate ending that doesn't trigger the credits roll nor the score tally. We can't consider this as fastest completion nor for any other Standard goal, so we can only consider it for Alternative. I'm familiar with this game, and I can tell that the goal of this movie is the most obvious one among the possible Alternative ideas, so it makes sense to pursue it.
Accepting for Alternative.