Dam Dam Stompland is a comedic top-down platformer-fighting game developed by Atelier Double and published by Sony Music Entertainment for the Sony PlayStation in Japan on December 4, 1997.
Featuring an unusual playstyle and quirky characters, Dam Dam Stompland tasks players with stomping the shadows of their opponent (while avoiding having their shadows stomped, both by their opponent and by NPCs).
Game Objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.8
- BIOS used: psj-30.bin
- Luck Manipulation
- Uses a suboptimal character
- Genre: Action
TAS Approach
Because the goal is to stomp the enemies shadow as quickly as possible, i needed a character that could run fast, or have an ability that could make them run fast. My choice fell on Lipty. Her special ability makes her run in a panic.
DamDam has a similar ability, where he uses his jetpack to move around fast. Still, it was Lipty that i wanted to be in the TAS, because shes funnier.
Picking Lipty initially loses around 1 second at first, but she may have better arena matchups later on.
Now i pick Lipty and play through Story Mode, where i have to defeat the remaining 6 characters of the game.
Controls
WASD: Moving around
Cross: Stomp
Square: Bodyslam
Triangle: Ability
Circle: Jump or Double Jump (Useful to cross water)
Strategy
I start off by pressing Start to skip the opening sequence for the battle and press Triangle on the same frame to activate Lipty's running ability. All of the opponents are situated on the bottom right of the map, so i run there and press square to bodyslam into them.
This counts as having their shadows being stepped on. You can stomp 1 frame after bodyslamming too to change rng and in one instance save an additional frame.
Enemies are launched into the air after their shadows have been stomped on and remain airborne for atleast 154 frames, or 2.5 seconds. During this time you can obviously not stomp on their shadow, the only thing you can do is position yourself for the next stomp.
The airborne time varies from character to character, sometimes it can be 154 frames and another character could have 156-160 frames. This most likely depends on their model, or even the sun.
When the match starts you may notice a map on the bottom, this is the map for the Suns current pattern. The suns pattern will roughly follow the letters shape. This is to predict the enemies shadow position, and to protect your own shadow.
Irrelevant to me though, because the matches are over in 5-6 seconds.
Items
Items are not used in the TAS, because it takes too long to spawn them in and even then, they won't even help in defeating the enemies quicker.
Some items are:
-Bubble: Protects you from being stomped on
-Fire: Pushes away the opponent
-Shrink: Makes it harder for your shadow to get stomped on
Items are obtained by stomping on a platform with a letter on it, after around 10s a chest will fall from the sky with an item in it.
Scoring System
After each match you will be awarded ranks by how you stomped the enemies shadow. Scoring needs to be kept as simple as possible and is done by stomping the enemies shadow on land. If done in water you will be awarded an additional rank, which loses around 38 frames.
You can stomp on enemies shadows after coming down from a jump which doesnt lose frames in the ranking, but is very very hard to do.
1. Yamada San
154 frames between knock ups. It takes quite a while to stomp on her shadow for the first time because of the distance. Lipty can run over water with her ability without sinking.
2. Bull-Q
160 frames between knock ups. There MAY be a possiblity with better RNG to have the moving robots push me towards him 1 frame earlier, but 99% unlikely.
3. Mash-R-F
156 frames between knock ups.
4. Savatini
154 frames between knock ups. On the last stomp enemies like to use their special ability as a last resort, making them annoying to hit, which was the case here.
5. DamDam
156 frames between knock ups. Annoying to hit...
6. Nanbu Koji
158 frames on the first knock up, then 154 frames. Im not sure what causes the last hit to be faster than the previous one.
The Story ends, but the inputs do not. After the story comes Lipty's ending. I chose to play through the ending by pressing circle at a reasonable speed, to let the viewers have more time to watch. If judges decide that i needed to end input earlier i will do that.
CoolHandMike: Replacing current tas file with one that skips the ending.
CoolHandMike: This is a fun quirky tas with a unique shadow stomping arena fighter. Looks optimized to me.
Accepting to Standard.
Congrats!
