Okay, so my death abuse in 2-6 didn't go as planned. I do have good news however, I found another exit (I hadn't noticed that there are more than 1 exit in some of the levels, this will be interesting). This exit doesn't even waste as much time as killing myself for the other one.
I hope to find a timesaver so that I don't get caught on the elevator's up/down cycle like I did. Again, this is a rough draft of the game to learn where everything is and what everything does. I'm hoping my second playthrough will be a lot more optimized.
Here is the new route!
Edit: Some more notes about the WIP and the game in general:
-Jumping into an exit so that you stop in the air is faster than jumping so that you stop on the bottom of the exit.
-Around 10200 or so, it would probably be faster to save 1 health for this part. I think that damaging myself at the spikes here would be way faster than one of the previous damage inflictions.
-When jumping onto ledges sometimes letting go of the jump button a frame later will cause the character to be a few pixels ahead.
-Sometimes pressing the button to change the direction of your projectiles will cause Tinhead to not move for a few frames. This shoud be avoided when necessary, and is especially true directly after spawning.
-Pressing the crouch button for any more than 1 frame will cause standing back up to take additional frames. Pressing it for 1 frame allows you to instantly walk again. I do this when killing enemies that you can duck and shoot.
This is to help me remember things about the game as I see them, and to anyone who will want to obsolete my TAS (if I actually finish it).
At any rate I stayed up a little bit late in order to finish the boss.
Here is that update.
Note: one of the collectables at the end of the boss fight is a lightning bolt (refills health to 5). I'm pretty sure I should get it being as it's not completely out of the way, and seeing as I have 0 health. I'll go into the first level of world 3 a bit and see what it looks like.
Status update (10/18/11):
Started over and finished 1-1 and 1-2 saving 9 frames so far over my test run. These improvements come from jumping into the exit on the right frame, and shooting an enemy with 1 directional shot and 1 duck shot, rather than with 2 duck shots.
I estimate this game will take quite a while to work out routes, so if anyone wants to help it would be appreciated.
Also, I have recently found an (obvious) shortcut in 1-3 that should save a HUGE amount of time. Don't know why I never noticed it before. (Edit: Just tested, it saves ~300 frames!)
