Club Penguin's Astro Barrier is back, this time with fewer issues to test the rules. See the
previous submission for more details.
✅ No longer requires SWF modification
✅ Uses an official Ruffle version
✅ Doesn't use a level skip hotkey
❎ May or may not count as its own game
❎ Might not be an objective goal
SWF
Use the parameters
--spoof-url http://clubpenguin.com -PmySetup= to get past the domain check. The TAS doesn't appear to sync on other versions this time.
More info.
md5: 8aee05393b84fe6bf317542179de30fa
Ruffle version
The
bug in Ruffle that affected the previous TAS is still unresolved. I made a
full 1-40 TAS last year as well, but didn't submit it as it would have faced the same issue. However, the game has secret levels which lead to an alternative ending, avoiding the problematic level (38) altogether.
There are two sets of secret levels (Secret Levels and Expert Levels). In each case you must wait 25 seconds on a tutorial screen, then shoot the ship that appears. The branch name could be "secret ending" instead.
Level skipping
This TAS starts at level 1. If you just wanted to complete the secret levels, you could start at level 10 or level 30 with a hotkey, but it made the most sense to start at level 1 and show off as much of the game as possible. Interestingly, this TAS only has a single level in common with the previous submission (30).
Gamehood
This was a minigame in
Club Penguin. Some minigames were released on their own elsewhere, but as far as I know Astro Barrier never was. TASing Club Penguin as a whole is quite out of the question at the moment. There will likely be more Club Penguin minigames submitted in the future, so it might make more sense to have them all under Club Penguin.
Mechanics
The game is quite simple: move left and right, and shoot at moving targets. Only one shot may be active at a time. In isolation, levels are quite easy to optimise, but overall there are some additional factors.
Your position between levels isn't reset, so finishing a level on one side of the screen may be slightly slower, but make the next level much faster due to the better starting position. There is also a fake "next level loading" screen that can be skipped with Enter. Sometimes it's better to leave this up for a few frames to be in a better position for the next level. Later in the game, turrets are introduced, which shoot at the same time as the player. These shots can carry over to the next level ("transition shots") which adds lots of possibilities.
Most of the regular levels are copied from my 1-40 TAS. I didn't go through every level quite as thoroughly as any%, but I don't know of any improvements.
There is a bug where you can press Enter after shooting the secret ship, and for example go Tutorial screen -> Level 11 -> Secret Level 2, which would be faster. I didn't consider this beating all the secret levels for the purpose of the branch though. If the goal was purely "secret ending", it should count, although it would be faster to skip the first set of secret levels entirely.
Encoding
Should this be accepted, it may be worth having an encode that skips the long waiting sections that take up over a third of the run. The encode I've linked does this (also, my encode is not up-to-date on the final level).
Conclusion
It's always fun to see what strategies and speeds are possible when TASing this game. Special thanks to PASRC for support, including figuring out how to run the SWF unmodified.
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Accepting as an individual branch.
1. Astro Barrier (2006)
2. Thinicetrobarrier (2008)
3. Astro Barrier (anywhere from 2008-2013, irrelevant for now)
4. Astro Barrier (2014) (it might have actually been late 2013, also irrelevant for now)
As I said last time, I prefer 2006 mainly for superficial reasons: it requires less modification to run, it looks nicer (or at least, more authentic for a retro-style game), and it actually has an end screen. However, later versions appear to be faster:
1. Pressing Enter at the start of the game goes straight to level 1, skipping the tutorial screen (-3f)
2. The targets on level 1 are in a slightly different starting position, but this can be worked around (0f)
3. After level 5 a continue button pops up as the rest of the game was restricted to members in 2010. While clicking this loses a couple frames, it's possible to shoot at this point and so get a better setup for level 6. (-6f)
Result is 3838 frames. After making the changes above, everything else synced, so I doubt there are any other relevant differences, but I haven't confirmed. I talked a bit here about running the modern version and why it's annoying. If the text was implemented properly it would add 1 frame at start.
Link to video
Also to note, this TAS doesn't sync on Thinicetrobarrier because the hitboxes for the final level's targets are different.
So yeah, this is more confusion and doubt that I didn't really want.
