Post by Mechuyael

Posted: 12/30/2007 3:01 AM

Post subject: Shantae

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LSK

Joined: 4/17/2006
Posts: 159

In my spare time, I've been playing Shantae, and decided to do a demo run just to see if it was worth TASing. I've beaten the first dungeon and am currently doing a minigame to get money [to buy VERY USEFUL powerups.] http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/520811343/Shantae.vbm is the current WIP. Feedback would be of much help, even by people who haven't played Shantae yet.

Posted: 1/3/2008 2:38 PM

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LSK

Joined: 4/17/2006
Posts: 159

http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/292745837/Shantae_%28U%29_%5BC%5D%5B%21%5D.vbm Second dungeon complete.

Posted: 1/7/2008 4:58 AM

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josh_l.

Player (101)

Joined: 3/25/2004
Posts: 189
Location: Austin

Your video desynched for me during the first mini-boss of the first dungeon. Which is weird, since you seem to be using the same version of the game I have. I thought about TASing this game myself, but it does take more work in the planning stages than one would expect, and it's probably beyond my abilities. The Zombie Caravan section in particular worries the hell out of me. It only appears at night, and has the potential to bring a TAS to a grinding halt. Also, it starts out slow, but takes off during the first dungeon. I think people would like it. It's basically Castlevania 2 with a hot dancing girl. I did make a couple of my own test runs, and took down some notes, and here's some things I came up with:

The only thing worth buying is Flash Bolts, which can be used to take the mini-bosses down in one or two hits. These are available in Water Town, so money should be earned early in the game in order to afford a certain amount of these. Button-combinations can manipulate luck and make larger gems appear after enemies are defeated.
Compared to Flash Bolts, all the special moves in Water Town are overpriced and slow, which is a pity 'cause the flip kick does look cool.
Warp squids from the first two dungeons should be obtained and used in the Oasis and Scuttle Towns. The rest of the squids aren't necessary.
The "Advanced Genies" upgrade would possibly be worth it, but VBA doesn't seem to allow Shantae to be recorded in GBA mode, so I guess there's no need to worry about that. I don't like the GBA color palette anyway.

http://girlyyy.com/ The El Viento TAS is the only decent thing I submitted here.

Posted: 1/8/2008 5:09 AM

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josh_l.

Player (101)

Joined: 3/25/2004
Posts: 189
Location: Austin

http://ohnolookoutitsaraygun.com/ShantaeTAS-prologue.zip Can't quite remember, but I think this may have been attempt to start off an actual TAS. It stops at the second phase of the first boss.

http://girlyyy.com/ The El Viento TAS is the only decent thing I submitted here.

Posted: 1/19/2008 2:10 AM

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josh_l.

Player (101)

Joined: 3/25/2004
Posts: 189
Location: Austin

up to the end of the first labyrinth. This probably can be considered a WIP at this point. I discovered that when Shantae loses all her lives, she's sent back to where the player last saved, but she gets to keep everything. If the player hasn't saved yet, she's sent to Scuttle Town. This opens the door for major death abuse. It also negates the need to get warp squids for Scuttle Town, so I'll only be getting the four for Oasis Town. Finding the right places to take damage is tricky.

http://girlyyy.com/ The El Viento TAS is the only decent thing I submitted here.

Posted: 1/25/2008 7:28 PM

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josh_l.

Player (101)

Joined: 3/25/2004
Posts: 189
Location: Austin

All the way past the 3rd Labyrinth now, but this will likely be the end of this version of the run, as I need to go back and correct some things. I may need to reastart as far back as midway through the first dungeon, in which case I'll just restart completely to see if I can't tighten things up.

http://girlyyy.com/ The El Viento TAS is the only decent thing I submitted here.

Posted: 11/1/2008 3:49 PM

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theenglishman

Active player (441)

Joined: 3/21/2006
Posts: 940
Location: Toronto, Canada

Hey Josh L., I'm considering picking up Shantae as my next project now that I've finished Prince of Persia. I've watched your third-labyrinth WIP and it looks excellent! I need to play through the full game myself before planning a route, but this looks like it should be fun.

My current project: Something mysterious (oooooh!) My username is all lower-case letters. Please get it right :(

Posted: 11/2/2008 7:56 AM

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josh_l.

Player (101)

Joined: 3/25/2004
Posts: 189
Location: Austin

That's good to hear since I'll never have the time to return to my run. If you're going to go for it, you should know that Exit Candies could potentially save a lot of time. I didn't buy any in my WIP, and what they do is return you to the beginning of a dungeon. Only problem is they're pretty expensive, so you'll have to do a lot of manipulating to get those large gems during the start of the game. But ultimately it'll be worth it. There are quite a few places in the dungeons where they could have been used, the part where I make a really LOOOONG excruciating elevator ride upward being the most obvious. That whole part could be skipped with a Candy. Along with that, Flash Bolts are extremely useful against minibosses, but not main bosses. They either don't work at all, or they just take off the same amount of damage a regular attack would. Thus they don't save any time against the 4th Dungeon Boss or Risky, and there was no need to buy as many as I did in my run. Also, I just found the final route I wrote down! --- From opening to Water Town, get 85-105 gems from bandits and spiders. Scuttle Town to Water Town, buy Flash Bolts and 3-4 Exit Candies, talk to Bolo Water Town to Labyrinth. Get warp squids in labyrinth. 6 Flash Bolts needed against bosses. Death warp to Scuttle, go to Oasis Town Return Warp squids in Oasis, then talk to Sky Go to the Labyrinth. 3 Flash Bolts needed against bosses. Death Warp to Scuttle, go to Zombie Caravan. Die a few times on the way, leaving only one life left. Race Rottytops then go to the Labyrinth. 1 Flash Bolt needed against bat monster. 1-2 exit candys needed Warp to Oasis, go to Bandit Town Talk to Risky, go to Labyrinth . 2 exit candys needed Death Warp to Scuttle (no need to drain life as there's instant death nearby), talk to Mimic Warp to Oasis, head to Sky Scope --- Looks like the only thing I didn't have down was how many Exit Candies are needed in Labyrinth 3. Feel free to use whatever notes of mine you need; good luck!

http://girlyyy.com/ The El Viento TAS is the only decent thing I submitted here.

Posted: 6/4/2010 12:19 AM

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MarbleousDave

He/Him

Player (12)

Joined: 9/12/2009
Posts: 1555

http://tasvideos.org/Rules.html#EmulatorSpecificRule It is worth mentioning that there is at least one GBC game, Shantae, that recognizes whether it is running on a GBA, and utilizes GBA's hardware features if available. However, None of the available re-recording versions of VBA allows recording GBC movies in GBA mode. If I were to TAS Shantae on VBA using GBA mode, I would use Goomba Color. Upon start up, press L and R together, go to Other Settings, set Identify as GBA to On, then select restart. Goomba Color can be found here.

Posted: 1/28/2011 3:58 AM

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cetaka

Player (98)

Joined: 10/10/2010
Posts: 13

I came up with a route for this game that's pretty similar to the above but saves at water town (and deathwarps there) instead of relying on the initial save location at scuttle town. It seems like this would end up saving a lot of time, mostly because you don't actually have to talk to mimic after completing the fourth labyrinth; you can just warp to oasis and use the spy scope immediately. I'm a little hesitant to start this, though, because it's probably going to be about an hour in length. Is there any interest in a completed run? also, I managed to get OoB in the fourth labyrinth (as seen in this video) and with the bird form it seems promising in that you can fly to the boss room in a lot less time than it would take to get the extra keys and go up there normally. The problem is that I can't see any way of getting back in bounds. Strange things also happened when I moved too far out of bounds: most of the time the game froze, but a few times I just died and respawned normally with Shantae flashing back and forth every few frames between her normal appearance and this:

I don't know if it's an emulation glitch or not but it would probably be worth investigating. If anybody's interested I uploaded a savestate. edit: you can get back in-bounds the same way you get out and by some great coincidence there's a similar hole near the boss door that saves a big chunk of time in the dungeon itself as well as letting me do without an exit candy.

Posted: 1/29/2011 4:38 AM

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josh_l.

Player (101)

Joined: 3/25/2004
Posts: 189
Location: Austin

cetaka wrote:

Is there any interest in a completed run?

Yes. YES. I order you to finish it.

http://girlyyy.com/ The El Viento TAS is the only decent thing I submitted here.

Posted: 1/29/2011 5:47 AM

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Orange_Claw_Hammer

Joined: 2/28/2009
Posts: 99

yes please finish this run, this game more than any other GB/C game really deserves a TAS

Posted: 1/29/2011 11:07 PM

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cetaka

Player (98)

Joined: 10/10/2010
Posts: 13

prologue walk to water town (85 gems) buy flash bolts and 3 exit candies, save, talk to bolo labyrinth 1 (get warp squids) walk to oasis town use warp squids, talk to sky labyrinth 2 deathwarp to water town walk to zombie caravan, talk to and race the zombie labyrinth 3 warp to oasis town walk to bandit town talk to risky labyrinth 4 warp to oasis town spy scope the biggest problem with this route right now is that in an extremely unoptimized test-run (played in real-time for the easy parts) i was a minute late getting to the caravan while it was still night. there really wasn't that much slack in the overworld parts of the testrun, so it leaves me with more than a minute of waiting around for nightfall outside the entrance to bandit caravan (day and night take 8192 frames each). this is....bad, since i can't find anything to do with the spare overworld time that doesn't waste time overall, other than doing all suicides for the deathwarp in the overworld. potentially i could just waste time in an entertaining way before then.

Posted: 1/30/2011 7:29 AM

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AKheon

Editor, Experienced player (894)

Joined: 1/23/2008
Posts: 529
Location: Finland

I tested this game for curiosity. Like in a few other Wayforward games, you can do an attack right as you fall of a ledge. Shantae begins a ground attack while falling down, but during this attack it's possible to jump again. This might help extending jumps or maybe reach otherwise unaccessible places somewhere. Don't know if this was known yet, but at least this topic doesn't mention it.

Posted: 2/7/2011 7:04 AM

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josh_l.

Player (101)

Joined: 3/25/2004
Posts: 189
Location: Austin

Ggh... that damned caravan. I managed to reach it a few frames before nightfall in my test run and I was so pleased, but of course it meant that any further optimizations would be useless. All I an think of is maybe use different warp squids and death warping. Would it be possible to find a way that takes up more time before the caravan but then saves more time afterward?

http://girlyyy.com/ The El Viento TAS is the only decent thing I submitted here.

Posted: 2/7/2011 3:24 PM

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Derakon

Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960

Well, you can detour to pick up the Monkey's Claw. It'd save you a bunch of transformations when taking out the tinkertank.

Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.

Posted: 2/7/2011 6:30 PM

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cetaka

Player (98)

Joined: 10/10/2010
Posts: 13

I did try detouring to pick up the monkey claw last week (the most opportune point seems to be after the deathwarp to water town after lab 2) but it didn't seem to save time based on a vague approximation of the different times involved. I wasn't very confident though so we'll have to do a more realistic test later. It definitely seems like it will eat up more time than there is extra daylight (and that's not including the time where daytime doesn't pass along the way) since in particular it would require another deathwarp to get back to water town starting from four lives. If that ends up not panning out then, at least, the extra time can be used to get all the necessary gems instead of getting some in the prologue, since time doesn't pass there. There could definitely still be a different route that ends up being faster overall though as you said. AKheon: I did notice that at some point but the little extra distance doesn't really seem to help clear any gap that I've seen. The monkey form lets you jump a lot farther and higher, though there is a lot of transforming overhead, so it could still be useful somewhere... Also I guess I forgot to post this video here, it shows the route in the fourth labyrinth using the out of bounds trick: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8eWjzHMtbc (starting from getting the flight form) edit: rewatching that video reminded me of something else I haven't investigated yet: manipulating the block puzzles in the fourth labyrinth and the column puzzles in the first labyrinth to be finished easily. I think I noticed that they started out differently in two different playthroughs but now I'm not so sure; I'll try to find them in memory at some point.

Posted: 2/7/2011 7:29 PM

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Derakon

Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960

Without the Monkey's Claw, you'd need to make 4 transformations per stone in the Tinkertank, or 16 transformations total. 1 to get to the stone, one to transform back (shorter since no dance is needed, granted), destroy the gear, transform back to monkey to get out, transform back, destroy the stone. Looks like a dance takes about 4s and reversion takes maybe 1.5s, so that's 5.5*8 = 44 seconds that could be saved if you had the Monkey's Claw. How much daylight do you need to burn? Getting gems seems obvious to do at this point too. EDIT: above is wrong since you can destroy two gears per pass, then destroy two stones. So that saves 2 transformation cycles; you're down to 5.5*6 = 33 seconds.

Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.

Posted: 2/8/2011 7:27 AM

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cetaka

Player (98)

Joined: 10/10/2010
Posts: 13

okay, here's my attempt to integrate monkey claw into the route (in the run you would deathwarp back to water town instead of scuttle, and continue to labyrinth 3). only ~5760 frames (~96 seconds) contribute to the day/night timer, leaving about a minute's worth of input where it's not incrementing, including the extra time needed to buy the storm puffs. in regards to the route shown in the video itself, it seemed like switching to monkey at the beginning was justified because of how much faster you can move through the first map but i mostly did it out of laziness. i tried to harm myself outside as much as possible. assuming that there's enough extra time before the next nightfall to get all the gems in the overworld which is probably fair since the above movie is lazy as was my approximation of the extra time (you would need 110 instead of 85, so you couldn't rely mostly on the spiders; after those i guess the small worms in the waterfall map wouldn't be horribly slow), getting the monkey claw would still have to make up for that extra minute when time isn't passing. other than disabling the steam engine it might speed up boss fights if the claw does more than 1 damage or something, i'll have to test some stuff. i think if it turns out to be close it would be worth getting anyway just for entertainment's sake. also in the above video the weird teleport that occurs after killing the weather vane guy can be used to get out of bounds in that cave. i was hoping that all of those caves would be connected in one out of bounds area or something but it didn't seem like they were, the game was crashing before i even went farther horizontally than the cave itself...

Posted: 2/8/2011 6:48 PM

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Derakon

Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960

I'm pretty sure the Monkey Claw does the same amount of damage as Shantae's hair whip, unfortunately. I heard the harpy weapon does good damage though; can the harpy fit through the tunnels in the tinkertank? Or if that speeds up the Risky fight at all it might be worth getting. Obviously this would be no help for burning daylight while waiting for the Zombie Caravan. I was unable to stunlock Risky when I tried; it seems like she has invincibility frames out the wazoo. Then again, I did also manage to hit her a few times with Shantae's charge->spin attack and it didn't seem to affect the length of the fight at all, so it may be you just have to hit Risky a set number of times. :\ A 100% run would have some hilariously fast bossfights, since the spinjump->kick animation can be spammed very quickly. In particular you could probably take out the Golem boss (labyrinth 2) in under a second once he becomes vulnerable...assuming you went out of your way to buy the upgrades beforehand, anyway.

Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.

Posted: 2/11/2011 6:25 AM

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cetaka

Player (98)

Joined: 10/10/2010
Posts: 13

i'm 3-4 frames short of the making the platform before it retracts, which is really sucky and discouraging. any ideas? http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/898316662/shantae1.vbm i guess the most pressing thing that i don't understand about the game right now is how to predict (and therefore optimize) how shantae clips through from the bottom to the top of some platforms. i was looking for a subpixel memory address that would maybe address this but couldn't find one yet. it didn't seem to be anywhere near the x and y position addresses.

Posted: 2/16/2011 12:17 AM

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cetaka

Player (98)

Joined: 10/10/2010
Posts: 13

Well okay I couldn't quite make the faster elevator, and at this point it doesn't seem possible to get there, so I played through the entire prologue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xRKnyjX-HM I think it's only about 4.2 seconds faster than the above WIP over 5 minutes but there wasn't much to optimize...

Posted: 2/16/2011 1:39 AM

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Derakon

Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960

Looking good! If there's ever a big enough waiting spot, remember to dance for the audience. :)

Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.

Posted: 1/7/2013 2:47 PM

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cetaka

Player (98)

Joined: 10/10/2010
Posts: 13

It's been a while! Someone showed me an invincibility glitch (video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05AzvLxH15E) which should save a bunch of time in the desert overworld and the second dungeon (no need to avoid those stupid electricity). The comment on the video explains how to do it. I was messing around trying to get it off of other damage sources, but didn't get anywhere so far. I'm not sure how much time it would save. Also, a while ago I did a semi-optimised first labyrinth (video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO77DL55Xqo) and using that I ended up being 50 seconds late/90 seconds early to nightfall at the zombie caravan loading zone. (Time doesn't pass in the second labyrinth but it does in the first so I needed to do the first reasonably well to get an idea of how much time I'd have). Saving 50 seconds is impossible barring a new glitch. 90 extra seconds might be enough time to make getting the monkey claw worth it since it should save some transformations in the third labyrinth (you can do rooms where you knock the eyeball into the hole in monkey form), but I don't have a third labyrinth route pinned down yet so I'm not sure.