Submission #9779: InputEvelution's Flash Papa's Burgeria "Rank 5" in 11:10.67

SHA1 of the swf: fdbfef7d5570d13baeca26e027df87d9109da02f

Created on Ubuntu 24.04.2

NOTE: In order for this movie file to sync, OpenH264 must be downloaded for ruffle to use, and --no-gui must be entered in ruffle's launch parameters.

Papa's Burgeria is an Adobe Flash game created by Flipline Studios and released on the 6th of December, 2010. It is the 2nd entry in the series of Papa Louie restaurant management games. Like my previous submission of this series, this TAS aims to level up to Rank 5 as quickly as possible - the most popular category to speedrun among the RTA community.

In this game, getting to Rank 5 requires the player to get 2100 points. Much like Papa’s Donuteria, 0 to 100 points are awarded per customer depending on how well their order was made, with triple the points awarded when earning a customer medal. Hence, the basic strategy is to get our tutorial customers (Penny and Wally) to come in on all 5 days and score 80 points or more on their orders so that we can get a ton of points on the final day.

Being only the 2nd game in the series though, Burgeria lacks some of the mechanics seen in other entries. There are no Closers, so the final customer each day is random and they won’t give harsher scores. There are only 2 stations for preparing orders instead of the usual 3, and the Build Station gameplay is so simple that it can be done perfectly in a matter of frames, leaving only the Grill Station as an area to lose points (and even then it’s surprisingly lenient despite a complex scoring system). Finally, the trick used to spawn customers quickly in Donuteria doesn’t exist here; instead we can only force them to spawn early by waiting 10 seconds in the Order Station, or serving everyone else first. With these factors combined together, Burgeria ends up feeling less “time management” and more “conveyor belt” in a TAS setting. Until Papa’s Pizzeria To Go! becomes playable in Ruffle, this is probably the most boring Rank 5 TAS you’ll see from this series.

Much like with Donuteria, I created a custom swf to simulate different RNG outcomes so I knew exactly how many calls to Math.random() I needed to add throughout the TAS to get the customers I wanted each day (done here by putting patties on the grill). This time I built my own version of ruffle to assist the process, referencing the modifications Randomno made for me last time, so that I could be sure the emulation was consistent.

This category has actually been TASed before by dolphindrewgames, posted here on YouTube, with a TAS time of 11:28.66 (stopping at last necessary input) and an RTA time of 11:17.43. As Papa’s Burgeria didn’t work in Ruffle yet when this was made, this TAS was instead made by using a Python script to automate mouse movement, as well as a modified version of the game that forced the optimal set and order of customers to come in each day. While my submission does beat Drew’s TAS, with an RTA time of 11:03.1, there are some differences between the two that are important to address here.

First of all, the RTA rules used by the Papa’s speedrunning community state that the player doesn’t strictly have to reach Rank 5. If they instead reach Rank 4, with enough points to reach Rank 5 the next day, that also counts as a valid endpoint. There are two reasons for this exception. Firstly, the points needed to reach Rank 4 on Day 4 can sometimes be more demanding than the points needed to reach Rank 5 on Day 5, so this offers some extra leniency to runners. Secondly, in this game, 6 customers come in at Rank 4 where only 5 customers come in at Rank 3, so counting this as a win condition also allows for some extra timesave that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Drew’s TAS follows the RTA ruleset and hence finishes at Rank 4 with over 2100 points, but for my TAS, I chose to instead restrict myself to actually reaching Rank 5. As such, I lost 773 frames having Chuck come in on Day 5, as well as 110 frames getting the New Customer cutscene for Alberto at the start.

The second difference is the version of the game used. Drew’s TAS was done on the latest version of the game available on Flipline’s official website, released in 2014, while mine was done on the version that was available there the previous year. Flipline Studios originally partnered with Mochi Media to put ads in their Flash games as a way of generating revenue, but when the latter company was dissolved in March 2014, Flipline updated their games to instead feature advertisements for their mobile releases. Crucially, while Flipline’s ads are always present even when offline, Mochi’s ads were not (nor are they present at all now), so by using an earlier version of the game, I was able to avoid spending 592 frames waiting in between days.

Taking these goal and version differences into account, the actual timesave over Drew’s TAS is closer to 24.03 seconds - quite significant for this game! There are a few things which this can be attributed to. Firstly, I spent less time on Wally’s order on Day 1, instead serving it immediately with just enough time on the grill to reach the 80 points required for a star. Secondly, I moved order tickets onto trays immediately after switching to the Build Station instead of waiting for the fadeout. Finally, the increased quality in TAS tools offered by Ruffle makes it easier to do things optimally than through a Python script, allowing small bits of time to be saved across the entire run.

While the Build Station in this game is easy to do perfectly in a TAS, it’s not exactly intuitive. The position of the bottom bun is misaligned from the centre point where you’re actually meant to stack all of your toppings, meaning you need to release everything a few pixels to the left of where it looks like you should. Getting 100% on the Build Station in this game is incredibly difficult to do casually, and this mistake definitely contributes to why.

The Rank 5 TAS for this game is so much of an assembly line that it ends up also doubling as an optimal Rank 3 TAS, a less popular category hosted on the Papa Louie Category Extensions SRC board. The time achieved by this submission for that is 5:54.9 TAS timing, 5:47.33 RTA timing.

(frame 2121)

Thanks to:

DrD2k9: Judging based on encode and sync verification by mohoc.

DrD2k9: The run looks good. While it doesn't actually complete the game, it is by far the most common endpoint for RTA speedunning. Using the precedent/explaination for acceptance set in [6230] Flash Papa's Donuteria "Rank 5" by InputEvelution in 10:56.27, accepting as an Atlernative branch. See Samsara's judgement here for a more detailed explaination of acceptibility of this category.

feos: Publishing (with r3gamerz's encodes)...