(Link to video)
Order of Twilight is a My Little Pony game created for a 48-hour programming competition. You play as the dreaming pony Twilight and must complete 12 screens worth of content to clear her mind of chaos. The main feature of the game is the spell system, which allows you to perform magic abilities. These abilities include rotating gravity, teleporting, and creating cubes.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: libTAS 1.3.1
  • Completes the game pretty quickly
  • Beats many screens in unintended ways

Comments

While this run initially seems like a simple puzzle platformer, it quickly becomes a rush to teleport to the end of the screen. The teleport spell allows you to teleport a large distance forward in whatever direction you are facing. It lets you go through walls and a tile or two above your current position if a tile is in your way. Another commonly used spell is the gravity rotation one which is used whenever we need to move somewhere quickly but don't have room to teleport. These spells are entered in through specific combinations of the arrow keys and can be quickly entered by pressing multiple keys on one frame.

Screen comments

Screens 1 & 2

The run starts as a simple run to the right until we unlock the fourth spell slot which allows us to super jump and teleport.

Screen 3

Since we have not yet unlocked the gravity rotation spells, we instead create cubes which give us enough height to teleport onto the hill and to the end of the screen.

Screen 6

Here we unlock the sixth spell slot which is immediately used to flip Twilight's gravity upside down. We then flip sideways which interestingly conserves our falling momentum and lets us keep this falling speed through our next few teleports, although this winds up forcing us to wait for a few frames to teleport near the end so we don't fall into the void.

Screen 7

The "diamond dogs" prevent us from teleporting, even when we use the invisibility spell which prevents them from hurting us, so we turn sideways to get above the dogs and teleport away.

Screens 12 & 13

Finally, we use a complicated amount of gravity rotations and teleports to get to the end of the level without falling into any of the spikes. We then obtain the final two spell slots and end input after entering the "???" spell. Twilight awakens with her friends on a sunny day, as the cutscene we skipped at the beginning of the game predicted. She immediately proceeds to perform flips in the air, just like anyone else would do after clearing their mind of chaos. I presume this makes sense to people who have watched the show.

Other comments

Special thanks to Maurice for porting his game to LÖVE 11.1 for better libTAS support :D

feos: Despite what the first screen suggests, this movie was quite cool, the audience agrees. Accepting to Moons. I have the avi dump if anyone feels like publishing it within 2 weeks.
Stovent: Processing...

TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14873
Location: 127.0.0.1
This topic is for the purpose of discussing #6146: lexikiq's Linux Order of Twilight in 00:47.23
Player (12)
Joined: 6/17/2006
Posts: 501
I was about to express my fear of the beginning of a dark era of submissions for silly game jam fan games... but this TAS is surprisingly entertaining and appears very well optimized. So that's an unexpected yes vote for me!
EZGames69
He/They
Publisher, Reviewer, Expert player (3967)
Joined: 5/29/2017
Posts: 2707
Location: Michigan
I am so glad to see a tas for this game, as soon as I saw that there was a move where you can teleport forward, I knew it would make for a funny tas. you did not disappoint. yes vote.
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't 12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!" Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish [Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
Player (136)
Joined: 9/18/2007
Posts: 389
Tried getting the movie to run on my Arch Linux machine. First problem LÖVE has reached version 11.1-2 so binaries don't match anymore. So to have a chance to try the movie, I edited in the new md5sum (extract the archive, edit, make a tar.gz from it, rename to ltm). Second problem libswresample.so.2 is required IF the game is invoked within linTAS but not if it is invoked through LÖVE directly, and it is not included in Arch Linux (any more??). I had to obtain libswresample2_3.4.3-1_amd64.deb from Debian. I extracted only the necessary two files from "data" into the same folder as libTAS Third problem That package depends on libavutil55, which is also not included in Arch Linux (any more??). I obtained libavutil55_3.4.3-1_amd64.deb from Debian. === > IT WORKS! (without any sound, maybe because I had about 50% of full speed?). It finishes the game.
lexikiq
She/Her
Active player (393)
Joined: 8/13/2018
Posts: 106
Location: United States of America
"ffmpeg-compat-57" in the AUR should provide the two packages you needed, although I only have ffmpeg installed which has other versions of libswresample that seem to work fine. Changing the movie's LÖVE hash also isn't required, the popup is just a warning that the movie may not sync correctly.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14873
Location: 127.0.0.1
This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [3841] Linux Order of Twilight by lexikiq in 00:47.23
lexikiq
She/Her
Active player (393)
Joined: 8/13/2018
Posts: 106
Location: United States of America
:D
MarbleousDave
He/Him
Player (12)
Joined: 9/12/2009
Posts: 1555
Twilight Sparkle is best pony. Seeing this beat in under a minute is crazy.