Hi everyone - first, I'm still recovering from everything, it was many hours of work to organize so many different things and I have not yet read every post in this thread. For those with constructive criticism, know I'm taking all of it into consideration. I'd like to echo that yes, we had to be very careful what information we gave the TAS'ers and we went through a total of 5 runthroughs from TAS'ers ahead of time, tweaking the documentation each time to try to find the right balance where the realtime runners stood a chance. Seeing as the result was within a few seconds I think we balanced it correctly, but know that it was not my intent to annoy others and I'm sorry for those who found the experience to be unpleasant.
I would also like to personally apologize for the bad commentary. There were some things that were out of my control. I had worked with CoolMatty ahead of time on what we were going to display on screen but he developed a health concern so serious that he had to seek immediate care. The developers of the game (Jordan and Rusty from
Vector 35) and I had a long conversation with Hannah who took over in his stead and we had everything written down in a notepad, but Hannah fell ill and was not in the stream room. It fell to Vulajin to understand what needed to happen, and while we had discussed everything ahead of time it was just too much to overcome. As a result, the name of the game was never displayed, the schedule was never updated, and I was unaware of both problems until after the event.
Of the things I did have control over, I'm most disappointed in my inability to be properly prepared to provide commentary. I was still getting urgent requests from p4plus2 and the level designers (SethBling and Panga) and while we had rehearsed absolutely everything several times from a technical perspective I never forced everyone to put down their various soldering irons, controllers, laptops, and other tools long enough to walk through a "who is going to say what?" rehearsal. This resulted in haphazard (or entirely missing) introductions of people, poor visibility of what the goals of each portion were, and a complete lack of review of what a TAS is (other than the review I did an hour prior to the start of the block when announcing the closure of the speed TAS competition). In part, reacting to feedback from SGDQ 2015 that the introduction was too long and reacting from Twitch chat and Reddit repeatedly saying that they could care less about our nerd stuff, I cut out the vast majority of the review of what a TAS is, but I now see that this was very unwise on my part. The pendulum swung too far in the other direction, and the consequences were the confusion people had about what had happened.
For those who are interested in downloading the game, I've temporarily placed the file here until it goes live officially:
http://sonic.net/~ac/tas/PwnAdventureZ.zip
