Zebulon: A Lost Cat is a PICO 8 game created by the developer of Cyclo 8 and Stranded Isle, NuSan. In this game, you play as the titular "Zebulon" and collect powerups and keys in order to expand your moveset and unlock new areas. This TAS aims to complete the game in the least amount of time possible, without using the game breaking "menu glitch"

Recently, the speedrunning community discovered multiple ways to abuse quitting to the menu to save time. The first glitch was a "pause glide" where exiting to the menu, then continuing, your falling momentum is reset and you can cover huge distances by pausing repeatedly. The second glitch was a platform clip. We found a way to get stuck inside of and eventually fall through semisolid platforms. These glitches are estimated to save between 20 and 60 seconds for the TAS, however I decide not to use them. The platform clip is still poorly understood. The discoverer of this glitch, Holoknight, spent 20 minutes repeatedly pausing and unpausing the game to get the clip once (while only a few minutes of in game time passed) and it has not been replicated since despite multiple runners trying. I couldn't even get it to work with TAS. Even if I did understand the glitch, the rapid pausing, menu navigation, and resetting the cart would likely be epileptic and I didn't really feel like skipping huge chunks of the game and the movement. So I decided to just not use it.

Clarification: Pausing is fine, but resetting the cart is not fine and is what causes the glitch. The game is paused several times in the run, but as long as I don't reset the cart and go to the main menu the glitch is not activated.

Since there are several powerups, each with their own movement tech, I felt that frontloading the submission comments with all of it would make for a harder read. So I will be explaining each section in order, elaborating on the different tech each new powerup lets me do. At the start of the game, all I can do is walk, jump, and do a fastfall. By releasing all other directional inputs and pressing down, my vertical momentum is stopped and I start falling at max speed immediately. I can use this to land on platforms sooner than I otherwise would be able to.

The first powerup I get lets me climb on the "vines" on some of the walls (the vines are the orange things, not the vines in the background that are green). Climbing up vines is slow, so it's usually fastest to climb up them by jumping off of them. When you detach from a vine, you have 4 frames of coyote time where you can still jump. This means that you can climb off the top of a vine, then jump, you can get extra height, which makes some skips possible. You can also detach from a vine, then turn around and jump a few frames later. This gives you less height than simply jumping off of the vines, but it can help position you more precisely, like if you want to grab the top of the vine to do a skip, but a normal jump overshoots. Lastly, your vertical momentum is conserved if you detach from a carpet on the first frame you touch it. So by grabbing a vine, detaching, coyote jumping back into the vine, then detaching again, you can get a lot of height, then do a coyote jump for even more height. This is how I reach carpets that are 3 blocks higher up.

There are two more skips in this section. First, I do a fastfall and then a coyote jump to go underneath a wall and reach a later platform, and at the long dropdown before the next powerup, I grab the vine for two frames to avoid conserving momentum and coyote jump to a semisolid that's normally out of reach.

I respawn via the pause menu as soon as I get the powerup, so that I can avoid backtracking. There are no checkpoints, so you always respawn in the same place near the door.

When you dash, you are unable to dash again for 6 frames, and you can't jump for 4 frames. If you try to jump before the 4 frames, you will get 1 frame of jump before the dash overrides it, which is useful in some situations. The same logic applies for fastfalls. You can dash midair, then fastfall after 4 frames, or fastfall immediately to get one frame of movement. Unlike jumps, you can continue to spam fastfalls to move incrementally down until the dash wears off. When you dash midair, you do not regain the ability to dash until you land on the ground. You also cannot dash off of a ledge and coyote jump. This makes normal dash movement rather slow.

By doing a fastfall at the same time you initiate a dash on the ground, you can do what is called an "fdash". When you do an fdash, you regain the ability to coyote jump and dash again (not before 6 frames though). This means that you can do things like dash off of a platform, jump, and dash again. The TAS abuses this glitch to spam dashes wherever possible, in places where you would normally not be able to. When reaching the vines at the left edge of this section, I use momentum conservation to skip a part of the level, then I go back to the right to reach the next powerup.

This powerup lets you break certain blocks. There are two ways to break them, by dashing into them or by fastfalling onto them. Although it makes sense to dash into them from the side, and fastfall onto them from above, dashing while on top of them and fastfalling into the sides also works. You also don't even have to be falling technically. It's a bit jank, but pressing down while on the ground and walking into them also breaks them sometimes. Breaking the blocks by walking into them from the side bounces you slightly, and by coyote jumping I am able to make it up to the higher platforms.

I use momentum conservation again on the next vine to skip straight to the next powerup, and then respawn with the pause menu.

This powerup gives me the ability to swim in water, which previously would have killed me if I touched it. When underwater, I have limited air and need to refill it by getting air bubbles, but I never have to go out of my way for them. In water, you don't need to touch the ground to dash, and you can move around with the arrow keys. Moving in a cardinal direction is faster than moving diagonally, so I try to move in straight lines when possible. When entering water, I want to conserve as much vertical momentum as possible, so I always fastfall into the water.

At the start of the water section, I go way further right than I need to, and I do an extra dash that stops my vertical momentum and should lose time. I'm honestly not 100% sure why it's faster, but it saves like 3 frames so I do it. I take a lot of weird lines in these sections, and they are all faster. I have to climb on the vine for a little bit since I can't jump underwater. There's another weird looking water entry and then I do some fairly normal movement to the next part. It's worth noting that dashes are really useful underwater because I can do them whenever I want, and I can use them to move horizontally quickly, and then hold straight up or down to cover more diagonal distance than would be possible by moving diagonally. Right before I exit the water, I actually spend over a second moving in a diagonal line, which looks really slow. This is because I want to grab the vine as soon as possible, and the quickest way to do that is to dash at the top of the water. I want to grab the vine as soon as the dash is over so that I don't waste time moving to the right, so I need to move to the right while moving up here. I briefly release right at strategic times here to let my momentum carry me further to the right while I hold only up. This technique barely makes a difference and is therefore not usually used in other sections, but here I have to move for so long that the tiny bit of drift adds up and allows me to save a frame.

It is once again faster to respawn after this powerup.

Now I can breathe underwater indefinitely, no air bubbles needed. I head to the next section, doing a similar weird water entry as before. There are a lot of nuances to the movement and momentum in these water sections but to be honest I don't remember all of it and I don't want to study the input file just so that I can go super in depth on every decision I made. All the lines here are optimal to the best of my knowledge. After exiting the water I jump over the spikes so that I can preserve my dash, and then I abuse spike hitboxes. By holding up in the water, I can float above the spikes, then in the water I can squeeze between the spikes horizontally (but not vertically!).

Before I talk about the section after I exit the water, there's a small detail regarding the optimization of this section. You can skip this paragraph if you want, it's boring, but I want to mention this. When I dash after leaving the slope, it's actually possible to dash a frame earlier. By pressing fastfall on the same frame I dash, I could get out from under the ceiling on the same frame, but input the dash earlier. The dash is processed before the fastfall, so this doesn't actually move me further right, but I could input my next dash a frame earlier because of the 6 frame cooldown. This doesn't end up saving time here because of the level geometry and the spacing, and it doesn't even break even here because the first frame of the dash is blocked by the wall, so you get a speed boost for 1 less frame. However, there are other parts of the TAS where this does save time. So if you're wondering why I do this sometimes but not other times, it just depends on the level geometry and the spacing and all that. Also, everything I said here applies to jumping and dashing simultaneously as well. It's also almost always faster to do this tech when you are not directly next to a wall, since the horizontal movement doesn't get eaten.

I use coyote time to climb up the vines quicker, and then I move to the left away from the powerup before dashing to it so I can double jump into the water above me without bonking on the ceiling. When I collect the powerup, the sound effect doesn't play because of there being too many sounds playing or using the same instrument or something. Idk it's a PICO 8 quirk that I don't understand too well.

You'll never guess what this powerup lets me do.

When entering the water from below, I can fastfall onto the semisolid from below and buffer a jump, which actually lets me perform a jump underwater and get a huge boost of speed upwards. Since I double jumped into the water, I have to touch the ground again in order to be able to double jump out of the water when I exit, which is faster than climbing the vine. Fastfalling onto the semisolid here also fulfills that purpose.

All powerups from now on are optional, so I don't collect any of them. Now, all I need to beat the game is to collect the 7 keys scattered around the map. Since I have my full moveset now, I can get them in any order I want, and I start by getting the one closest to me. It's in a water section to my right. I go between some more spikes, and go through sand, which forces you to move down and acts like a solid ceiling from below. There is some tech to go through sand faster, but it doesn't work underwater. I use the same tricks as the other water sections to go fast here, and before I get the key I do some fancy movement to grab it higher than normal so I can exit sooner. If I just held up after getting the key, the speed from the dash would cause me to drift to the left, so I hold right for a bit to cancel the momentum. But I actually start holding right a frame late, which saves time for some reason.

Once I get out of the water, the movement gets a bit ridiculous. I wasn't able to show off much in the slow water sections, but now that I am able to spam fdashes and double jumps and everything it gets more fun. Normally, the camera follows the cat, but at the edges of the map the camera pans and then goes static. While the camera is panning, I'm so fast that I almost go off screen. And later in the TAS, I actually will go fully off screen a few times (which was annoying during the TASing process but is quite funny when you're watching it back). The double jump also makes doing momentum conservation much easier and faster. I don't have to set it up by letting go of the vine and then coyote jumping into it anymore. I can instead just go straight to the vine, and double jump the frame before I touch it.

There is an alternate route here. You can get to the second key from the outside by going to where key 3 is, falling through the sand, and doing a precise dash and double jump. But not only does this lose roughly half a second, you also have to do the movement at the start of key 3 twice in this route, which is boring.

The movement on the way to key 3 is pretty fast but if you slow it down or go frame by frame it's pretty easy to understand. There are just two things I need to mention. First, it's sometimes faster to space dashes out a bit instead of spamming them on the first possible frame every time. This is because sometimes doing an extra dash will cause you to go further than you want to, so you need to walk. You decelerate gradually after a dash ends, so it can be better to space out the dashes by a frame or two so that you cover more distance with more speed, without doing an extra dash. The other thing is when I grab the vine right before I enter the room that the key is in. Here, I press z and x on the same frame in order to climb up the vine a frame faster. This is a piece of tech I was sure would be completely useless when I found it, because the circumstances in which it would save time are so specific. This tech only saves one frame, so it's usually faster to jump up the vines. But this vine is one block long so that can't happen. Doing this also locks you into the dashing state when you get off the top of the vine, but you don't get the full horizontal speed from the dash. However, this actually works in my favor here because it means I can jump up sooner than if I had actually dashed to the right.

Sand works the same way as it does underwater, but fastfalling lets you move down a bit for one frame before the sand slows you down again. The fastest way to get through it is to spam fastfall until you're out. I do a fastfall and a dash on the same frame at the end so that I can dash again sooner. I then do a glitch called a sand bounce. If you position the cat between tiles, so that he is standing on both a sand tile and a ground tile, fastfalling will cause him to bounce, and you can then do a coyote jump to get a lot of extra height, about as much as an extra double jump. I do this to get more height and dash over the next wall sooner. I also double jump at the same time to save a frame.

After climbing the vines, I carefully position myself so that I can fastfall onto the block next to the sand and do an fdash without falling into the sand. Since dashes are processed before jumps or fastfalls, doing an fdash while partially off of a platform doesn't work and would get me stuck here.

Treasure skip

Okay, I'm going to finish writing the submission comments later. In the meantime, you can read the subtitles in the encode. I'll write a detailed explanation for everything else soon.

Game link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3047460/Zebulon_A_Lost_Cat/

The version this TAS was made on was the free DLC cart.

I found a way to glitch out the ending cutscene and potentially end inputs early, but I was told that it might not actually technically officially count as "beating the game" so I just did it normally here. If you want to see what the endings look like, you can watch this video: https://youtu.be/uCs1X-N4ee4

The water sections were very difficult to optimize, so I wouldn't be surprised if a couple frames could be saved here and there. I also think I could save a frame right before key 5 by doing a double jump and dash at the same time, but I barely wasn't able to get enough height to make it work. There's also a ladder that looks like it can be climbed faster, since I dash into it without double jumping, but for some reason double jumping didn't grab the ladder any higher. While I was working on this project, I wrote down a couple of things to go back and improve on later in case the TAS wasn't a sub 1:50. Once of those things was "sand jump height". I have no idea what I was talking about, but apparently that's something that at one point I thought was a potential timesave I missed. I'll try to write less cryptic notes in the future.

There is a major skip which is close to being possible, but I did a lot of testing and couldn't get it to work. After getting the dash, instead of respawning, you can go down to the disappearing platforms, fastfall the frame that they disappear, and then coyote jump late to go under the wall. You barely bonk on the ceiling here, but if you could make the jump you could go straight to destruction force and save 5-10 seconds.