General Comments

Holy cow, this TAS is finally complete after nearly 7 years in the making, sort of. I started this in 2015, mainly as a crazy idea that I wasn't sure if I wanted to follow through on, so I TASed the first few rounds to experiment. Then I got into SGDQ 2015 so I put down this project to pour my spare time into practicing my run, then after that Super Mario Maker happened and I completely forgot about this TAS.
5 years later I picked it back up as a pandemic project in 2020, when lockdown first hit and I wanted stuff to do to stave off cabin fever while keeping myself locked inside. I put it down again in 2021, then finally I got a flash of inspiration in January and came back again to finish it. So overall I'd estimate this was a little under a year of work, but scattered across a period of 7 years.

Input Mechanics

Holding Down causes bombs to fall faster and reduces the delay between spawns. However, it only has an effect after you've been holding it for about half a second, it does not affect bombs that have not yet fully spawned, and you can't do anything else except kick or fall as long as you hold it. Any bombs in midair when you release it will fall one more cell before reverting to normal fall speed. This can be exploited to make bombs sync up in a manner such that they land on stacks of different height on the same frame and explode simultaneously, saving frames on the clear animations. This is first seen in Round 30.
A and B inputs can be buffered. Pressing either one for a single frame while Toad is walking or falling will cause the input to be processed on the next viable frame. In a few places, I use this to buffer one input on the first frame possible, hold Down, then make the next input on the first frame where it wouldn't be buffered, maximizing the amount of time I'm holding Down.
Turning around is faster in midair since you can move immediately afterwards, whereas turning around on the ground incurs about a 10 frame delay before you can do anything else except kick.
Holding Right during the victory animation at the end of each round makes Toad shrink back down earlier, effectively skipping the middle part of the sequence.
The game tries to prevent you from influencing a chain once it's started to explode -- if you try to perform any action that would cause an object (other than Toad) to move, Toad freezes in place and blinks, and the action doesn't resolve until the chain has resolved. However, if Toad isn't carrying anything, he can still move around freely. In the case of explosions that spawn a diamond, the hitboxes for the exploded objects are cleared when the diamond spawns, *but* the diamond spawn makes everything hover in mid-air a la Wile E. Coyote for 19 frames, making it possible to influence the resolution of the chain by moving underneath an object during Coyote Time to catch it.

Luck Manipulation

Which column a bomb spawns in depends on the frame and some inputs, and it can be manipulated by pausing. The first bomb roll happens when the fairy's circling animation finishes. However, at the start of each subsequent level, the roll occurs either on the first frame after the monsters spawning animation finishes or roughly 1 second after the music starts to play. One row of monsters spawn every 9 frames, therefore if there are 4 or more rows, the first frame you can pause on is the frame after the roll happens. Thus later on in the run I start waiting extra frames for luck manipulation at the end of a level before hitting right to move to the next level.
Additionally, some levels have 2 possible patterns, and which one you get appears to depend on some hidden state that can't be affected between levels (between when the final monster is cleared until Toad moves to the next level). Spawning a bomb usually seems to flip the pattern for the next level, although sometimes the flip seems to occur a few frames before or after the bomb spawns.
However, the column is not purely random. The fairy seems to be biased towards columns with fewer things in them, and heavily biased away from columns where the bomb it's about to spawn would create a match upon landing if nothing else is moved. This means it's sometimes faster to pick up a column of monsters and put them under the bomb after it starts to spawn, rather than wasting half a second or more on luck manipulation.
The color of a bomb, on the other hand, cannot be manipulated. At least, everything I tried wouldn't change the color of the next bomb. It appears to use a separate seed that's only incremented with each bomb color roll. In a few places I get around this by intentionally losing frames on one level to spawn an extra bomb and advance the seed for the next level. Round 27 is the first example of this.
Diamonds can be manipulated, both for color and position, by pausing during the clearing animation they're spawned by. From what I could tell, sometimes every frame spent paused cycles both the position and color, while sometimes every frame cycles the position but every Nth frame cycles the color where N is the length of the line that's spawning the diamond. I've yet to figure out what causes the change in behavior. Note that not every position/color combination is possible, since the diamond RNG appears to cycle every 16 frames.

Level-by-Level Comments

Most early levels and some later ones are fairly straightforward, so I'll only write comments for levels that were particularly cool, fun, or frustrating to optimize behind the scenes, or levels that have some non-obvious things going on.

Round 8

This was the first time the diamond frame rule got in my way. There's 2 colors and I spawn a diamond with a 6-in-a-row clear, which meant a blue diamond could only appear in odd positions and a white diamond could only appear in even positions. This prevented me from manipulating a blue diamond to spawn in the second row from the top, which might have been a few frames quicker. However, the second (white) diamond spawns in a position where it doesn't produce a third diamond and waste time, without any frames wasted on luck manipulation.

Round 12

This one was pretty fun to come up with the strat for. At the end I pause one extra time to avoid spawning a 4th diamond and save a couple frames.

Round 23

This marks the first appearance of the monsters that have to be bombed twice, changing color after the first one. In this case they're pink and turn red. On later levels they can be gray -> blue, white -> green, or cyan -> yellow. But a diamond takes them out in one hit. However, if you bomb some pink monsters and they turn red, then get a pink diamond, it won't hit the red ones.

Round 24

And here we have the first appearance of the other two-hit monsters. These guys (yellow in this stage) need to be bombed twice with the same color. After the first bomb they blink for a while, but if you don't hit them a second time within a few seconds, they revert to non-blinking and take another 2 bombs. But again, a diamond takes them out in one hit.

Round 27

At the end of this level, I intentionally release Down one frame too early to stall so that the roll for the next bomb's color happens. This loses 13 frames but allows me save significantly more by getting a blue bomb immediately on the next round.

Round 30

Oh, boy. This round was a massive pain to optimize. I tried two completely separate strategies and this was the faster one. The other strategy was to spawn diamonds, but the setup took so long that the time saved by the diamonds didn't make up for it.
Here I also use a well-timed Down release to make the yellow and cyan bombs sync up and explode simultaneously, saving about 2 seconds of clear animation on the yellows.

Round 36

This was the most frustrating luck manipulation up to this point, mostly due to the lack of any way to influence bomb colors. I think I tried about 3 different routes through this level before settling on one that still spends a couple seconds advancing the bomb color sequence but uses that time to set things up for later, while manipulating bomb spawn positions to minimize the number of frames I need to move around and therefore maximize the amount of time I hold Down to speed up bomb spawns.
Much, much later I realized I had forgotten to do the victory animation skip on R34 and R35, which would've saved about 3 or 4 seconds total. The first time I went back and fixed those, it completely desynced the RNG in this round to the point where I could no longer get the diamonds to spawn in the positions and colors I wanted, so I left things as-is. Then after finishing all the way through to R99, this was still bugging me so I gave it a second shot using the better understanding of the RNG and its 16-frame cycles that I learned from doing the later levels, and finally got the RNG to sync back up.

Round 41

At the end, I wait an extra 32 frames to spawn one more bomb so that I get the better of the two patterns for Round 42.

Round 47

The two patterns for this round were roughly equally complex. I tried both of them and this one turned out to be 76 frames faster.

Round 51

At the end it's about a second faster to hold Down and use the blue bomb that's about to fall in the perfect spot anyway, but somehow doing so affects the RNG state in weird way that it completely changes the bomb color sequence in Round 52 to an absolutely horrid sequence that loses a lot more time. So instead I move Toad left and use the blue enemy to fill the gap instead.

Round 53

This is an unusual example of a round where you clearly want one of the two patterns for non-tool-assisted runs but the other is better for TAS. The other pattern is actually significantly less complex of a layout, giving you much more flexibility to deal with RNG. But in a TAS, luck manipulation makes this pattern faster.
I intentionally manipulate luck by delaying before making clears a couple times instead of pausing in order to spend enough non-paused frames for one more bomb to spawn, which puts the RNG in a state to give me the better pattern for the Round 54.

Round 59

Luck manipulation for this round was, to use the technical term, a massive pain in the tuchus. I mapped out and tried 2 different strategies that both got aborted halfway through because there weren't any frames that could get a diamond to spawn in the right position with the right color. Then I couldn't manipulate the green bomb to spawn in the center column and lost a couple dozen frames, until I came back to this round after finishing the whole TAS, and figuring out that I could change Toad's movements in a way that manipulates the fairy into the center column. But then I had to resync the RNG state, which took through R61.

Round 62

Dropping something so it lands on the exact frame as a falling bomb allows both clear at once, potentially linking them into one longer clear. I use this to form a 5-in-a-row with the yellows.
Then once again, losing some time at the end to get the better pattern for Round 63. Somehow in this case I didn't need to wait for the bomb to fully spawn to advance the state for the part of the RNG that decides which pattern to use for each round. I do the same thing in the next two rounds, but there it seems to require the bomb to fully spawn.
Fun fact: I got to the end of this round before realizing that I had been forgetting to do victory animation skips since Round 34, so I went back to add them as much as possible. It turned out adding them in R34 and R35 desynced the RNG state so horribly that it became unrecoverable in R36, but from R36 onwards I added the victory animation skip and painstakingly redid every RNG manipulation in R37 through R62 by hand. I even had to redo R56 entirely, but I managed to resync the RNG state for R57. And finally after finishing R99 I managed to figure out how to resync R36.

Round 66

Another round where luck manipulation was a massive pain. I had to redo the setup twice before I got one that could lead to both diamonds spawning with the right position and color. I'm quite happy with the end result though.

Round 68

I got all the way to the end of Round 69 before noticing a small movement error, so I came back, re-optimized this round, then resynced the luck manipulations through the end of Round 69. Turned out all that work saved 49 frames.

Round 70

Another massive pain in the tuchus, but for completely different reasons -- there's 5 monsters of each color, so to make a diamond you need to either make a 6-in-a-row clear or leave a single monster behind, the latter of which would take two more bombs of the same color to finish off.
Making matters worse, after clearing the pink diamond, no frame makes a green diamond spawn in column 3, so I had to settle for a column 5 green diamond which requires a bit more setup time.

Round 75

The first round where every monster requires 2 bombs. I was actually pretty lucky to have the RNG in a state that makes it even possible to execute a solution this efficient.

Round 86

This shows what appears to be an audio glitch in the game. If you kick an object just as something clears below it, the kick sound plays twice -- when you press the button, the game seems to erroneously register a valid kick on the midair object and plays the kick sound, then it detects that the object is in midair and cancels the kick effect, then once the stack lands, the kick takes effect on the object that lands in front of Toad and the game plays the kick sound again.

Round 96

This is one of my favorite chains in this whole run.
Incidentally, bombing color-changing monsters with a 5-in-a-row still spawns a diamond if another diamond is used to clear all monsters of that color on the same frame.

Round 98

This was a massive pain to optimize, since it's the only round where *all* the monsters are diagonal-only. But I'm very happy with the solution.

Round 99

Here I ran into a weird issue (probably a bug) where Toad can't pick up a single object while falling if it's in the second row from the top.
There's a special fanfare that plays upon clearing Round 99, so I let it play out before I proceed to the ending cutscene. This costs 291 frames and is the only entertainment/speed tradeoff in the run, although the time loss would be after the point when the timer would stop in an RTA speedrun.

Samsara: Judging!
Samsara: The submission file has been replaced with a 230 frame improvement that also adds a speed/entertainment tradeoff by letting the special fanfare play after the final round.
Samsara: Apologies for not getting to this earlier! The file has been replaced with a further 320 frame improvement.
Samsara: I'm not gonna lie, this was insanely hype.
What struck me the most while watching it was just how evident the luck manipulation is. Maybe it's just my familiarity with the game speaking, but nearly every level looked almost too good to be real. The exact color of bomb you need dropping right where you need it, gems appearing in exactly the right place to wipe the field, combos appearing out of thin air with nothing more than a small pause, entire fields of enemies just getting decimated within seconds... Pretty much as soon as the levels started getting a little more complicated, the TAS turned into its own highlight reel.
Given that this is a distinctly different mode from what the published run uses, I'm accepting this as a new branch!

Zinfidel: Processing...


TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #7322: PoochyEXE's SNES Wario's Woods "Round Game" in 34:17.98
morningpee
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Temporary encode: Link to video For reference, the RTA WR is 1:11:15 currently. My favorite level was 59 because it was so clean. Easy yes vote!
PoochyEXE wrote:
There's a special fanfare that plays upon clearing Round 99, but unfortunately letting it play out would lose about 5 seconds, so I simply skip it and proceed to the ending cutscene, although the time loss would be after the point when the timer would stop in an RTA speedrun. If the community and/or mods think the speed/entertainment tradeoff is worth it, it's easy to change the movie.
+1 for hearing the special fanfare Edit: Replaced video with encode of User movie #637798894512418864 Edit edit: Replaced video with encode of User movie #637806096666496015
Projects: Tetris DS Genesis Toys: Let the Toy Wars Begin
nymx
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Wow, it says a lot when you are able to beat the game by more than half of the RTA. Very impressive...it pays not to rush. Yes vote.
I recently discovered that if you haven't reached a level of frustration with TASing any game, then you haven't done your due diligence. ---- SOYZA: Are you playing a game? NYMX: I'm not playing a game, I'm TASing. SOYZA: Oh...so its not a game...Its for real? ---- Anybody got a Quantum computer I can borrow for 20 minutes? Nevermind...eien's 64 core machine will do. :) ---- BOTing will be the end of all games. --NYMX
PoochyEXE
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Thanks for the temp encode! I've uploaded a modified version with the special fanfare: https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/637798894512418864 (It literally only inserts 291 blank frames before the final Right input to proceed to the ending cutscene.) I do agree that it makes for more entertaining viewing, so judges, please go ahead and replace the movie file when you get a chance.
PoochyEXE
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Sorry, please hold off on judging for a little bit, I spotted a couple optimizations that I think I can add in while still being able to resync the RNG state afterwards. I'll probably have a new version in a day or two. Edit: Done! https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/637806096666496015 -- Please replace the movie file with this new one. I've included a changelog in the upload description. (Note that this still includes the fanfare at the end.)
morningpee
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PoochyEXE wrote:
Sorry, please hold off on judging for a little bit, I spotted a couple optimizations that I think I can add in while still being able to resync the RNG state afterwards. I'll probably have a new version in a day or two. Edit: Done! https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/637806096666496015 -- Please replace the movie file with this new one. I've included a changelog in the upload description. (Note that this still includes the fanfare at the end.)
Linked to a new encode. Also, now the RNG in 59 is even sillier. Love it
Projects: Tetris DS Genesis Toys: Let the Toy Wars Begin
PoochyEXE
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I'd like to delay this again since I re-watched the encode and spotted a couple more optimizations. I should have another new version ready in a day or two. Sorry if this is getting annoying, I keep thinking I have everything optimized only to come back several days later and notice another little imperfection. Edit: Done! Saved another 320 frames. https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/637811121948338188 None of the changes are quite as interesting as the R59 improvement from last time (R59 is one of my favorites too), just a bunch of subtle smoother movements and setups here and there.
Samsara
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Will there be any further work done on this?
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
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PoochyEXE
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Nope, I'm finally done. I had found a couple other optimizations, but a few minutes ago I just finished testing out the last of them, and they actually end up losing frames, since I ended up having to spend more time on luck manipulation on subsequent rounds.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [4604] SNES Wario's Woods "Round Game" by PoochyEXE in 34:17.98
PoochyEXE
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Cool to see my work finally complete and published! Thanks for the prompt judging and processing! I noticed the publication page says it obsoletes the previous run, even though this was meant to be a new branch (and Samsara accepted it that way). Was the decision changed, or is this an error? Also, if you'll excuse the nitpick, the description mentions stuff from the NES version that aren't in Round Game in the SNES version, namely minibosses and cutscenes of Wario trying to discourage Toad. The SNES version doesn't have minibosses, and the cutscenes are different -- in Round Game they just show Toad moving through the overworld map, and the cutscenes with actual dialogue were moved to the SNES-exclusive VS COM mode, with different dialogue.
Zinfidel
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PoochyEXE wrote:
Cool to see my work finally complete and published! Thanks for the prompt judging and processing! I noticed the publication page says it obsoletes the previous run, even though this was meant to be a new branch (and Samsara accepted it that way). Was the decision changed, or is this an error? Also, if you'll excuse the nitpick, the description mentions stuff from the NES version that aren't in Round Game in the SNES version, namely minibosses and cutscenes of Wario trying to discourage Toad. The SNES version doesn't have minibosses, and the cutscenes are different -- in Round Game they just show Toad moving through the overworld map, and the cutscenes with actual dialogue were moved to the SNES-exclusive VS COM mode, with different dialogue.
The errors were a result of a lazy, good-for-nothing publisher. He's in the dungeon for his mistakes.
MarbleousDave
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There are 255 rounds in the game, but the ending is after 99 are completed. We could go for 255 rounds for full completion, but what about the VS mode?
PoochyEXE
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Technically there aren't 255 rounds. There's a fixed rotation of 32 extra rounds that start at 100 and loop until 255, i.e. rounds 100 through 131 are identical to rounds 132 through 163, rounds 164 through 191, and so on. Then round 255 loops by itself, and the only indication that R255 is the end is that the starting layout is exactly the same and the round number doesn't increment. So one could make a 255-round video but the latter half or so would be pretty boring to watch, and there isn't really a sense of completion at the end. Or one could also make a video up to the point where the extra rounds loop, but again there wouldn't really be a sense of completion at the end. Edit: On the other hand, rounds 101 through 105 have patterns that spell out W-A-R-I-O with the monsters across the 5 levels, which would be cool to incorporate into a TAS somehow. VS COM would be a good third branch though.