Clear all 8 scenarios in order, starting from a new game, as quickly as possible.
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In most cases, I switch to the closeup view of the red nest and rely the game's auto path-finding to lead the yellow ant to the red queen. In a couple areas, the ant easily gets lost, so I guide her manually for a bit. In the last scenario, I intentionally delay the her movements for a few frames to give time for a spider to turn around; without the delay, she gets eaten en route to the red nest.
During the fights, I rapidly press A and B (alternating 2 frames A / 1 frame B), to boost the chances of winning. A random value is selected at the start of the fight, and then compared to a second random value at the end of the fight to determine the winner. The first value must be greater than the second for the yellow ant to win. Every one of the A/B button presses increments the first value, and the fights usually last long enough to increment it well past the second value. When the second value is too large for this to work, I buy more time for button presses by briefly pausing the game mid-fight.
The YouTube recording is a slightly earlier revision where I didn't press A at the end to close the final dialog boxes. Otherwise, it's identical.
It might be faster to guide the yellow ant manually instead of using auto path-finding, in all the scenarios. However, there is a trade-off since it takes time to transition to and from the surface closeup view.
slamo: Interesting strategy in this one. It does indeed look like it's faster to watch the red ant nest and let the AI pathfinding work, mostly due to skipping one of the transition screens. On the maps where the AI can't get there on its own, guiding the ant on the overworld is unavoidable. The small AI confusion on scenario 3 is forgivable considering everything happens off-screen.
I've changed the branch name to match the game mode's name in the menu. Accepting!
Looks good to me! Can't say this is super entertaining, but still very satisfying. I always wondered how those fights worked.
Would using the SNES mouse make navigating the menus a bit faster?
Hm, without knowing the game, I have to admit it was very hard for me to parse what's going on. Without reading the description, it's not clear which parts require tool-assistance (and, indeed, which parts even require control by the player). I have to admit that I was more interested by the novelty of a game I didn't know than the gameplay at hand. It's also fairly repetitive to boot.
It might be faster to guide the yellow ant manually instead of using auto path-finding, in all the scenarios. However, there is a trade-off since it takes time to transition to and from the surface closeup view.
Considering how simple the game appears otherwise (2k rerecords), it seems to me like it would've been worth it to test it more to give a more conclusive answer.
I have to vote Meh, sorry.
Looks good to me! Can't say this is super entertaining, but still very satisfying. I always wondered how those fights worked.
Thanks! I agree on the entertainment value point. Most of it is waiting for the ant to move offscreen. And I really wish I could skip those cutscenes.
Would using the SNES mouse make navigating the menus a bit faster?
That might help. At maximum sensitivity, the pointer flies across the screen almost instantly. I experimented with the mouse in tastudio, but I gave up when I saw I’d have to specify integer values for x and y for each frame of movement. If I were to go that route, I think I’d have to use Lua to calculate them for me.
scrimpeh wrote:
Hm, without knowing the game, I have to admit it was very hard for me to parse what's going on. Without reading the description, it's not clear which parts require tool-assistance (and, indeed, which parts even require control by the player). I have to admit that I was more interested by the novelty of a game I didn't know than the gameplay at hand. It's also fairly repetitive to boot.
It might be faster to guide the yellow ant manually instead of using auto path-finding, in all the scenarios. However, there is a trade-off since it takes time to transition to and from the surface closeup view.
Considering how simple the game appears otherwise (2k rerecords), it seems to me like it would've been worth it to test it more to give a more conclusive answer.
I have to vote Meh, sorry.
Those are all very fair points. I admit it’s not the most exciting thing to TAS, and it’s partly a design flaw of the game. Each scenario has its own features and challenges for casual play, but the fastest strategy for all of them is to run straight to the queen yourself and button mash. So the only things to optimize are routing to the queen, lag reduction, and beating the game’s frame rule that checks on the queen. And the seven identical, unskippable cut scenes really don’t help make it watchable.
This was my first attempt at a TAS, and kind of a warm up for doing the full game run that I also posted. Now that I’ve learned more and worked on tooling to analyze it, I see potential time saves.
Here’s a video I just uploaded where I render mini maps to monitor everything:
Link to video
The yellow ant clearly gets lost around 2:35 and backtracks a bit. Better manual routing can fix that and save at least a couple seconds, though with the frame rule, it might not matter in the end.
