RTA timing ends at Frame 11134, the last necessary input. I've been going too easy on the Judges and Encoders with my last two submissions being for actual emulators, so here's a return to form with my very first Hourglass submission, brought to you by Windows XP!

ENCODE/PLAYBACK INSTRUCTIONS:

SOUND?

GAMEPLAY/NOTES: This is the type of game that is challenging for human players, but is extremely easy for a TAS. There is no momentum or acceleration, so the sole factors in speedy completion are the precision with which you cancel your jumps, and the speed with which you are able to spam the jump button in order to glide distances. You may notice that I am constantly making what appears to be arbitrary pauses between jumps; this is actually because the game won't let you jump in most cases until the frame before the automatic scrolling kicks in, and a universal delay between repeated jumps besides (the latter of which being relevant in the penultimate 'survival' section). There are two precise but human usable skips made possible by permissive hitboxes of obstacles; and finally, there's ONE tech in this game, which allows you to jump higher if you canceled your last jump precisely before landing, avoiding going into the gliding animation. This is trivial, as I cancel jumps early as a matter of course, and to scroll the screen as quickly as possible.

There is ONE note to be made about the goal: namely, there is a Second Tower. This was, I am lead to believe, not a part of the game's very first release, and is in all aspects a second, harder campaign. However, it is NOT accessible by SRAM as this game makes no save data, and thus can only be accessed by either beating the First Tower in under 12 minutes or by entering the cheat code "QUEEN" at the title screen. I am also lead to believe that, at least at one point, it was possible to obtain the Second Tower (Jill Off Harder) by paying anna anthropy 1 dollar on itch.io to receive it as a second executable. This is very relevant, because Hourglass became increasingly unstable as I recorded further into this game, crashing more frequently with fewer separate savestates the longer the recording length got; while this was perfectly manageable for the length of this first playthrough, I suspect it would become very problematic for completing both towers back to back. I will attempt to see if the alleged standalone executable is still obtainable, and ask a Judge if use of the "QUEEN" cheatcode to skip to the Second Tower is acceptable; however, failing both, it is very likely that this movie will be obsoleted if I eventually make a single followup movie containing the run for both towers consecutively.

POTENTIAL IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing concrete that I am aware of. It is possible that a few frames can be shaved by micro-optimizing the movement, but otherwise, the only potential major save would come from the section where you have to lead away a spider that blocks your path upward. There are no trivial timesaves or mistakes to remedy, however, thus fulfilling the optimization requirement.

feos: Claiming for judging.