Rolly is a platforming game where you jump, roll, hop, and dive through caves to rescue your friends. This TAS aims to complete the game in the fastest time possible.

There are 5 main areas in Rolly. The tutorial can be skipped by selecting "reset to hub" in the pause menu, and then there are 4 cave sections that can be accessed from the hub and played in any order. Each cave is themed around a specific mechanic, but the different mechanics and obstacles appear in other sections too.

Rolly can use the arrow keys to walk and z to jump. When on the ground, pressing x will start a roll. Rolling is faster than walking. In midair, pressing x does a dive, or a hop if you are holding up. Hops give extra height but drastically lower your speed, while dives give little height but are just as fast as rolling. Dives and hops allow you to turn around on a dime too, which is useful due to the extremely low acceleration in this game. You can perform dives and hops while grounded if you are rolling. You can also dive and hop off of walls, in addition to your standard walljump. If you hold away from a wall, you won't stop wallsliding for a few frames (you stick to them for 8 frames I think, but I forget exactly how long it is). Once you do a dive or a hop, you completely lose control over Rolly until you land on the ground or touch a wall. I recommend playing through Rolly before watching this TAS. I can't explain through words how hard it is to control Rolly. The acceleration is the possibly the slowest of any platformer I've played, and the fact that you lose control of Rolly every time you do a dive or hop makes precise platforming or adjustments nearly impossible. It's no wonder that the TAS is almost 2 minutes faster than what RTA runners can do.

In each stage, you are supposed to get a key, then use it to unlock a chest, freeing a "friend". Then you take the friend to an exit portal that warps you back to the hub. It's faster to return to the hub by dying after freeing the friend though, so I avoid all checkpoints if possible so I can deathwarp immediately after the chest in each stage. The only stage this isn't possible in is the top right one, so I save that for last so the exit portal cutscene doesn't count towards TAS time. For the rest of the stages, the only significant difference is that after warping to the hub from the tutorial, you don't have to touch the ground near the statue to officially "save" a friend. So levels that are faster to enter starting from the ground should be done second or third, while the bottom right stage is fastest if done first.

Crumbling blocks break as soon as you touch them in the rolling state. You will also bounce off of them while rolling. I land next to the first wall as close to it as possible, roll when I touch the ground, then jump to regain control of Rolly. The fastest way to climb walls is to walljump off of them, then hop backwards into the wall and repeat, however the specifics vary from section to section. Here I hop into the crumbling block and the normal wall so that I touch them on the same frame. This causes the crumbling block to break, but I don't get bounced and instead am able to walljump normally, letting me squeeze through the gap quickly and jump over the checkpoint. In the next room, I can quickly break the crumbles by standing next to the wall facing it, and then rolling. I can walljump off the crumble at the top of the room as it's breaking to get some distance and then start a dive to keep momentum in the next section. Getting in one block wide holes without wallsliding is much harder than it looks. The gray walls are "bouncy walls/floors" and they bounce you if you are in the rolling state like crumble blocks. They also reflect you if you roll into them on the ground, unlike crumbles though. This is why I can't do the same trick at the end of room three that I did in the first room. You're supposed to break the crumbles in room four, then go around a loop and fall through them to the next part. It's pretty easy to skip that though. The spike hitboxes are lenient in this game, which is why I can do a dive in the lower half of the screen. It also allows me to land on the edge of a spike in room 5, so I can cancel the rolling state after destroying the bottom right crumble. I do a small skip to get the key early before entering room six. In this room, I am able to perform a dive while between two crumble blocks. You get bounced proportional to your speed, so by ricocheting off of both of the crumbles I can build up a lot more vertical speed than I should be able to have. Room six has nothing particularly interesting. Room seven has the first deathwarp, and some of my favorite movement in the TAS. One thing to note about deathwarps, when Rolly is respawning, he splits into a bunch of particles, and only when all these particles overlap over the respawn point does he respawn, whether that is the hub or a checkpoint. Since these particles are random, I need to manipulate RNG by getting different dust particles during movement or by simply delaying the death by a frame or so (I don't think I do that here though). This also matters for the tutorial skip. I could get out of the first chest with a dive to the right, but I dive left to make the respawn animation faster.

It's barely possible to get onto the platform from the right side with precise walljumps and hops. Room one doesn't have much interesting going on, neither does room two. Room three takes an unintended path by landing on the edges of spikes. Room four contains the key and the chest, so I can deathwarp out from here. I again use the edges of spikes to get the key from the right side, which is not the intended path. This is the shortest of the four areas.

This section is themed around the bouncy walls and floors. Instead of using dives in the first room, I roll and then immediately jump out of them so that I keep control of Rolly without sacrificing speed. Right before the first checkpoint, it looks like I pause but I'm actually holding left the entire time. Rolls move you in whichever direction you are facing, not the direction you're holding. I can't do a dive here because of the spikes, and I can't do a grounded dive since I would have to start rolling, which would collect the checkpoint. So I have to stand here for an agonizing 4 frames, even though I started holding left half a second ago. The acceleration in this game is just so slow. I will explain what orbs do later. I do a grounded dive at the edge of the platform so that my bounce reaches a corner that sticks out of the ceiling, letting me cancel my rolling state. In screen two, you're supposed to bounce through a long automatic section, but I can skip it with a well timed dive. Room three has a tight staircase in the top left. I do some fancy movement here but it doesn't actually save time over normal movement. We get a glimpse of some rooms that will come up later, and for simplicity's sake I will refer to the room after the staircase is over as room four. Room four mostly just consists of a walljumping section. Room five is an intersection of multiple pathways. You are supposed to go left, get a checkpoint and a glimpse of a later section, go down, get the key, go up, get the chest, come back from the left and cross over to the right to the exit portal. I will be skipping all that. I head to the room with the key as normal, but as soon as I get it I start backtracking using the edges of spikes as platforms to speed up the process. There is an unavoidable checkpoint up ahead, so backtracking to room five to skip it is faster since I can deathwarp. The problem is that you're not supposed to do that, so the developer put spikes everywhere. This is the most precise trick in the TAS. When going from room six to room five, you should die, but you actually get a small speed boost when transitioning into a room from below, which makes it barely possible to clear the lowest spike. From there, you can do pixel perfect and frame perfect walljumps and dives on the edges of spikes to climb up to the left pathway. Since there is a bouncy floor, I can't dive or hop onto it, so I have to do a maximum height walljump which just barely makes it onto the platform.

This section is themed around orbs, and is the only section where a deathwarp is impossible. Orbs essentially toggle your rolling state. If you aren't rolling, you will automatically start, and if you are, you will regain control of Rolly. This allows you to do extra dives or hops in midair, or can force you to roll into a section (like the one right before the automatic part in the bottom left cave). Orbs become intangible after being touched, and only become tangible again once you land on the ground. Nothing noteworthy happens until room five, where I'm supposed to be forced into a roll, but by jumping out of it I can barely maneuver around the spikes and fall into the next section. I once again need to wait to turn around again, then I enter room six, which has an unavoidable checkpoint. I drop down into the top half of room one to get the key, doing the section in reverse to save time. From there, I open the chest, climb to the exit portal, and end inputs as early as I can.

Game link: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=31526

I held off on submitting this TAS for a long time because I wasn't satisfied with the optimization. After discovering the deathwarp in the bottom left section, I hastily rearranged the level order, but some parts desynced, other parts needed to have the RNG manipulation redone, and I discovered that the orb in the hub floating up and down isn't just visual, it actually moves up and down on a cycle, so there's probably frames to save by finding a different level order where the cycles line up better. I think that up to a second could be saved with some effort, but I didn't want to work on the TAS anymore so I just never even tried. Looking back on this though, I think it's a pretty cool watch and most people liked it, so I just figured I'd submit it anyways.

eien86: Claiming for judging.

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eien86: A cute little pixel art puzzle/platformer for the PICO-8. Here, there author traverses flawlessly through all the screens of the four stages to end up with a time two minutes faster than the current RTA WR. Accepting to Standard

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