This game is a pretty simple game in which you control a helicopter by clicking to make it gain altitude and that's about it. It's an infinite game and the goal is to go as far as possible. Unfortunately, the game is poorly coded and frequently generates sections that are impossible to pass as they're tighter than the helicopter hitbox.
Emulation
Note that I modified the ending to reduce number of frames in the end since the encode.
I did a run with the System Time 1 seed, but it turned out to generate an impossible section pretty fast (around 1000), which ended the game on a lower score than what you can find in RTA runs on youtube. I tried another seed, which allowed to go as far as 4636, which seems good enough for a submission.
Potential screenshots:
Room for improvement
This is a pretty low-effort TAS.
Improving this TAS would mean looking for better seeds. This would mean either:
- TASing it manually for each seed to see how long it goes, which would be a tedious process
- finding a way to automatically determine how far the first impossible section is. I'm not exactly sure how to calculate this. This is a geometry problem.
- Somehow implement terrain generation to see the whole terrain without having to TAS the level, so you can see if a seed seems promising (or just patch the game to be invincible and explore the seed)
- training a neural network on this very simple game so you go directly go to the hard sections and manually test if they're possible to pass (which is something I might do in the future... Don't mark my words).
