Spacegulls by Morphcat Games is a short NES howebrew platformer. It is a fun and easy game but also good introduction to speedrunning in my opinion. As I currently hold the world record, I wanted to see how far the game could be pushed, so here is my first ever TAS!
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1 with NesHawk
- Rom from the official website https://morphcatgames.itch.io/spacegulls SHA1 14a8b1d66c126698148972ffa962abd73c24c561
- Progress through the game by beating enemies and collecting keys to open the doors
- Final goal is to beat Dr. Beak
- 5:11.700 (18702 frames)
speedrun.com rules: time starts when start button is pressed, time stops when landing on the ground on the final screen.
Controls, basic mecanics
There are only 4 buttons used in this game
- Start to pause (not used) or start the game from the menu
- Left/Right to move
- A to jump or fly
Hold jump from the ground to extend your jump.
When in the air, jump will fly once, no matter how long you press the button.
Enemies are hit when you are falling on them (DuckTales style). You deal 1 HP per hit.
You have 20 HP, a small egg will refill 3 HP and a big egg will refill 7 HP. Eggs can be found on some screen and enemies drop them depending on your kill count (4, 8, etc)
Enemies
- Green duck: 2 HP
- Green walker: 2 HP
- Red duck: 5 HP
- Wall turret: 5 HP
- Gunner duck: 3 HP
- Red jumper: 2 HP
- Saber duck: 3 HP
- Dr. Beak (final boss): 31 HP
Speed tech
By order of appearance in the movie.
Reaching maximum horizontal speed
When the character is stopped or changing direction, press A in the direction you want to go to quickly reach max speed
Reaching maximum fall speed
Hit a ceiling to immediately get max fall speed. If there is no ceiling available, it is worth to jump before falling to start increasing your fall speed.
Flying
30 hz A press to fly as fast as possible.
Double hits
Land at the bottom of an enemy hitbox to remain inside of their hitbox and get a second hit once their iframes are gone.
Door tiles
When the door opens one tile is removed at the time, so you have to fly through the first opening tile (for example at the top of a vertical door).
Damage boost
Keeps your horizontal speed while giving you iframes, but you can't move or jump for a few frames. Knock back is always on the opposite direction from when you character looks at. A direction must be pressed a few frames before your character actually turns.
Infinite hits with ceilings
When bouncing on a red duck and hitting a ceiling at the same time, you chain hits the fastest possible way.
Despawning
An enemy leaving the screen is counted as dead (2 red ducks room after the third save)
Skip enemies
Door will open when you kill all enemies present at the start of the screen, so any additional spawning enemy can be ignored.
Wall secret
Around the middle of the movie, I pass through spikes and a wall on the right, this is an intended shortcut.
Key grab from below
In the zigzag room with turrets, you can grab the key from below thanks to your character hitbox being big enough without getting on the upper level.
Damage skip
On the boss you may notice that I don't take damage from a bullet. This happens when you've just hit an enemy. It looks like the game gives you some iframes (seems frame perfect).
Screen transition bump
Sometimes when transitioning into a lower room, you character will stop for a few frames as if you were landing on the ground. Changing your X position slightly before transitioning will prevent this.
Unused: ceiling clip
Every 6 frames or so, running and full jumping into a low ceiling will partially clip you into the wall. I could not exploit this to go OOB or gain any advantage.
Possible improvements
- Health and damage boost: it may be faster (few frames) to change the health routing and skip or add some damage boosts
- flying red duck kills: the fastest way I found to deal with them is to get to bring them to the top of the room to get continuous damage as fast as possible. There may be other manipulation to damage them earlier or make them fall earlier after death (which would open the doors slightly sooner).
Have fun watching this!
DrD2k9: Oopla has a
situation making it unknown when
theoretical improvements can be looked into. Also, I've become intrigued by this game and will likely be doing a detail evaluation of the run at a later date, but I have no idea how long that may take. As such, I'm not going to leave this on the workbench any longer. The run is high quality as-is.
Accepting.
DrD2k9: Oops, forgot to upload a truncated movie file. Updating the movie file with one that stops after the last movement button press. This update retains unnecessary movement (for now considered as stylistic) beyond the last input needed to beat the game, but removes all the "B" button presses that don't do anything at the end of the run anyway.
