The Fancy Pants Adventures: World 1 is the first of a classic series of platformers developed for Adobe Flash, featuring a stick figure with fancy pants who runs, rolls, and slides through levels with a hand-drawn style. In this run, I aim to beat the game as quickly as possible.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: Ruffle (build from 2022-02-24, though future builds should also work)
- Game version: 1.7b (can be found here)
- Aims for fastest completion
Movement
Fancy Pants Man can move left or right with the arrow keys and can jump with the S key, with varying heights depending on how long the S key is held. He can also crouch by pressing down, and he can roll if down is held when landing from a jump. Running is generally the fastest, as jumping and rolling both lose speed. However, rolling has the property of attacking enemies, which can be useful in some cases. Fancy Pants Man also has an unlockable wall jump ability, but this ability is not obtained in this run due to how slow it is to obtain and how little time it saves.
Fancy Pants Man also has the ability to run on some walls and ceilings, though this usually only happens when the ground gradually slopes into a wall or ceiling. He can jump or run off them, and if he bonks his head, he can bounce pretty high.
When it comes to combat, Fancy Pants Man has a few options: he can jump on the enemy, which is usually slow but can give decent height if jump is held; he can roll into the enemy, which allows him to stay on the ground; and he can jump over the enemy, since most enemies don't need to be defeated. Since rolling can't be done all the time, I usually jump over enemies.
Tricks
- When running off a wall or ceiling, the player usually loses control over Fancy Pants Man until he lands. This can be avoided by not holding the forward key when running off of the wall/ceiling, allowing for more control over where Fancy Pants Man lands at the cost of initial speed.
- Fancy Pants Man can accelerate to higher speeds on the ground than in the air, so when crossing a gap, it is usually best to have some speed already before jumping across the gap and to land as quickly as possible to accelerate faster.
- Some parts of platforms don't have collision, allowing you to clip into them. Inner collision can be glitchy, potentially leading to teleportation.
Level 1
Level 1 is a fairly simple stage, consisting of some quarter and half pipes and some platforms. I turn on the in-game timer at the beginning for easier comparisons between this TAS and RTA runs. When running to the top of the first quarter pipe, the player usually goes high enough to touch the swirls, but by positioning myself properly and slowing down a bit, I can lower my peak and reach the next slope sooner. I then jump off this slope and bounce to the leftmost of the series of platforms. After that, I run through the first half pipe and skip the second half pipe, as it's faster to skip it than to run through it. I then do a high jump off the slope to reach a higher platform. After that, I do a trick called Kraitch's clip, where I jump into the dark blue platform to glitch onto the ceiling. I can then run to the left, which teleports me into the wall on the right, allowing me to skip the upper section and save around half a second.
Level 1.5
There are subareas between each level; the community refers to them as level x.5, where x is the level preceding the subarea. This subarea consists of a few moving blocks and a spring. There isn't a way to do this section much faster than what RTA does, so I jump to the spring as soon as I can. Note that it isn't possible to jump directly from the moving block onto the spring.
Level 2
This level is more vertical, featuring a bunch of springs and platforms. After getting off the spring, I wait a bit before moving right so I can land farther away from the gap, allowing me to jump across it faster. I also move to the left after getting off the next spring so I can land on the edge of the next ledge, allowing me to have more speed into the next section. Jumping on the first pillar and over the second pillar saves a few frames compared to jumping on the enemy. After getting off the half pipe, I jump up a series of platforms and use the knockback from a spider to land on the platform with the spring. This avoids having to jump to the platform below the spider as well as the platform the spider is on. From there, I run back and forth between springs to ascend through the level. It's not possible to reach the left platform from the second-to-last spring, so landing on the right platform with room to accelerate is optimal. Killing the final spider with a roll ends up being a few frames faster than jumping over it.
Level 2.5
This subarea consists of some moving platforms with solid platforms in between. I slow down a bit before the downwards slope to keep running on the slope instead of falling off the top. The resulting speed is enough to run off the next slope and land on the moving platform.
Level 3
This level takes place outdoors, with some trees and stone blocks scattered throughout. Towards the middle of the level, I roll into a spider and jump off the other spider to skip a spring. Towards the end, I slow down a bit when dropping down from the hill to avoid bonking on the ceiling.
Boss battle
In this boss fight, you fight against an angry penguin. The penguin's only attack is to charge at you, and you damage the penguin by jumping on the penguin once the penguin reaches the wall. There isn't much to do in this boss fight, so I jump and duck to the music to make the fight a little more interesting.
Shoutouts to the Fancy Pants speedrunning community (especially Luciousness and dha) for finding strats and pushing the game to its limits, as I used a lot of its resources to learn what is possible in this game and got feedback which I used to improve this TAS.
Comparison
I optimized this TAS using the in-game timer as a guide, though I don't think there's a difference between optimizing for real time and optimizing for in-game time.
| Section | RTA | TAS | Time saved |
|---|
| Level 1 | 25.90 | 24.47 | 1.43 |
| Level 1.5 | 12.20 | 11.93 | 0.27 |
| Level 2 | 39.40 | 38.40 | 1.00 |
| Level 2.5 | 9.17 | 9.13 | 0.03 |
| Level 3 | 21.43 | 19.27 | 2.17 |
| Boss | 24.37 | 24.23 | 0.13 |
| Total | 132.47 | 127.43 | 5.03 |
Potential improvements
- In level 1, it is possible to get a bounce that goes all the way from the second quarter pipe to the top ground, which may save a few frames if done. However, I don't think it's possible with the specific amount of height I got from the first quarter pipe, as I can't land on the second quarter pipe at the top. Implementing this trick would require getting slightly more height from the first quarter pipe, which is a lot harder than it looks, since most of the time, the game gives you full height regardless of speed, which would lose too much time. In addition, getting enough height from the bounce to even reach the top ground is also difficult.
- Kraitch's clip is very difficult to get in a fast way, as most of the time, you land above the platform or fall below the platform, and most of the rest of the time, you either land on the wrong side of the ceiling (which can still save ~0.1s over not doing the trick at all, since you can clip to the correct side), or you land on the bottom of the correct side, where it takes so long to walk to the teleport spot that the trick loses time. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a few frames of improvement here.
- In level 2, in the section before the damage boost, it is possible to jump to the second platform from the slope in an RTA setting. This trick is known as the lq jump, where lq stands for low quality. As the name implies, this jump is easier on the low quality setting of Flash, but it is possible on the high quality setting of Flash. (The game allows the player to cycle through low, medium, and high quality settings by pressing Q.) Unfortunately, the trick does not seem to be possible in Ruffle. Not only can I not adjust quality levels in Ruffle, but I also made a deterministic setup that works with the high quality setting in Flash but doesn't work in Ruffle. I also tried to get the trick RTA in Ruffle and wasn't close to doing so. If this trick was implemented, it would save up to 0.3 seconds.
Info Teddy: At author's request, replaced file with 4-frame improvement by TheAmazingAladdin and added them as co-author.
Info Teddy: Replaced movie file with one that sets the platform to Flash.
Info Teddy: Very cool game, this beats all known records and is optimized well even if there is potential for improvement. Accepting to Standard.
