I decided to make a few changes and speed this up. But these days I don't have the patience to do a full game. So I optimized the first level and the boss fight. Thank goodness this game doesn't desync. I do not plan to submit any changes or improvements to the other levels, but others are welcome to.
Changes:
In the first level, I kill the rats on the earliest frame, stay less time in the air, and change (kill collect kill collect) into (kill kill collect collect) in one place. This spends less time waiting for about 100 frames of savings.
In the Apartment level (3) I tried improving the movement but I'm not sure it actually did much.
In the miniboss fight, I bounced slightly on the right side of the boss's head. This has the effect of luring him to the right, so you can exit the level faster.
Mechanics I learned about:
Fall Damage - I couldn't find the RAM address which tells you how far you can fall before dying. Usually the way these things work is that somewhere remembers the last "on ground" vertical height. The next time you are "on ground" it checks if the fall distance was too much. This means that you can temporarily survive by bounding on enemy heads, but as soon as you touch the ground again you'll die unless you can use it to bounce back up to a safe height. You can initiate a jump 1 frame before you die, but it doesn't help you.
Jump Arc - It seems like the way they programmed it is that holding B reduces gravity. If you let go of B, then press it again, your upward velocity will increase faster until you hit the zenith of your arc. It looks pretty strange. Similarly, if you walk off a ledge while holding B, you will fall slower.
Gliding - Alternating B lets you walk off cliffs as if there is ground. There doesn't seem to be much point to it, because the only level that has significant gaps is level (3) which mostly requires going down. But there might be a different path which you can take if you didn't need to wait for the platforms because you could glide to somewhere not quite visible on screen. Mind you, fall damage still applies because it's not frame-count based, but height based.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: I see the new techniques at play, early in the game. Not sure if they ones you have used are useful elsewhere...since the game strategies change a bit as the game goes on. Nevertheless, you have done a great job figuring new cuts to an already great run.
Four days have past and no comments on this. Why am I mentioning this? Well...nobody doesn't seem to want to take your offer to further improvement this movie. The last submission had a lot of comments, shortly after it was submitted. Doesn't seem like anybody wants to comment or vote....so I'm going to go ahead and try to clear this up quickly, since we have quite the queue to manage.
Setting branch to "Louie" to keep it consistent with the previous run.
