Here's a pretty good game that you haven't heard of. You should
give it a shot. (Convert the .exe with
this tool to make it run on Windows Vista or later.) Here's an introduction blurb I wrote:
Soldexus is an action adventure game created almost entirely by Patrick Ching II (aka Pneophen). It follows the example set by other adventure games (like the Castlevania series) for its layout and structure, while taking inspiration from 2D fighting games for other elements and mechanics, making for a unique mixture of exploration and technical combat.
Our unlikely hero, Ian, embarks on a quest at Death's behest, to navigate through the Temple of Despair and retrieve the Soul Gem from Phobos. Things get more complicated when rivalling ninjas with guns and an attorney with magical powers get involved.
Soldexus was programmed in Game Maker 6, and released during April of 2006. At the time of its release, it received notable praise for its graphics, with players citing its charming style, good usage of parallax scrolling, and especially its sprites with varying levels of transparency; the lattermost was not often seen in Game Maker games at the time. It was also known for its high difficulty, which drew ire from some players and praise from others. As of this writing, its original entry on yoyogames.com has a rating of 4.0 from 950 members, and has been played over 45 000 times.
I have a fondness for this game since playing it to full completion in my early teens. Since then, I've become very interested in (and entertained by) TASes, and want to make one of my own. I thought this game could be a good place to start — it's not terribly complex, but it has plenty of enemies (bar early Great Hall, I guess), a lot of potential for movement optimization, and some entertaining bosses. Hopefully a TAS would be entertaining enough to warrant a publication, despite the game's lack of notability.
I've created a
fair amount of resources about the game (don't click that if you don't want spoilers, obviously), including a full map, documentation of how every enemy is affected by every attack, and details on many techniques and behaviours in my technical handbook. Some of my more notable discoveries: I discovered the Rise bug which breaks huge parts of the game, I found a password to unlock everything from the title screen, I figured out how RNG can be manipulated, I found a copy of 1.01 and figured out how its Float bug works, and I broke the game's completion system by discovering that an Attack Upgrade instance was placed in a non-persistent room. (For gruefood, I also made a Trivia section in my handbook.)
Unfortunately, it looks like an efficient TAS of this game still can't be made yet. For one, Hourglass (r81) doesn't capture audio from Game Maker games in encodes, which is basis for submission rejection. The other no-go is that it doesn't seem to be possible to press and release a key during the same frame using Hourglass, which some techniques rely on. Setting the frame rate to 60 doesn't work, because that results in a weird 2-3-1 cycle of frames per step, rather than making every step 2 frames. Hourglass' interface is also just quite inadequate for what I'd like — for example, it doesn't facilitate modifying input on previous frames, which would be very important for RNG manipulation.
But I figured I'd post about this game anyway, 'cuz why not. Hopefully anyone discovering the game from this post enjoys playing it, or at least finds my research interesting. And when Hourglass does get resurrected with new builds, someone should let me know.
