SHA1 of the swf: 6c4de199e38ee7f3cafa19d491c2684e7802b99b

Created on Ubuntu 24.04.2

NOTE: This TAS uses the following launch parameters for Ruffle: --no-gui --player-runtime air --width 480 --height 320 -g gl PapasPizzeriaToGo.swf

Papa's Pizzeria To Go! is a game for iOS and Android mobile phones created by Flipline Studios and released on the 13th of November, 2014. It is a remake of Papa’s Pizzeria (originally released in 2007 as the first game in the Papa Louie restaurant management series), the third entry in the To Go! subseries, and the 16th game overall. This TAS aims to level up to Rank 5 as quickly as possible - the most popular category to speedrun among the RTA community.

As is standard with most games in the series, getting to Rank 5 requires the player to get 2100 points. 0 to 100 points are awarded per customer depending on how well their order was made, with triple the points awarded when earning a customer medal. To earn a customer medal, we need 5 stars, and to get a star, we need to score an average of 80% on a customer’s order. Hence, our primary goal is to get our first tutorial customer (Kingsley) to come in on all 5 days so that we can reach Rank 5 without having to waste time perfecting each customer’s order. We also want the customers that arrive each day to have short, simple orders, so that we don’t have to spend as much time writing them down or preparing them.

Notably, the options for spawning customers early are far more limited in the To Go! games than other entries - unlike Flash and HD, you cannot spawn them by switching between stations or waiting around on the Order Station. Consequently, serving all previous customers becomes the only way to force a customer to arrive earlier, forcing a quick turnaround time on orders. Fortunately, Pizzeria To Go! is incredibly simple in its gameplay and lenient in its scoring, so it makes a good fit for this kind of routing approach, giving rise to a conveyor belt strategy similar to the Burgeria TAS. Though, due to the presence of Closers in this game, I did have to alter my approach slightly from Burgeria so that their pizzas would be as cooked as possible to maximise points.

There were a couple other things that stood out to me as interesting when making this TAS. One was the flexible aspect ratio of the game, being able to range anywhere between 3:2 and 2:1. As it turns out, this affects how long it takes for customers to walk to the counter after spawning, so by using 3:2, I was able to save up to 53 frames per customer over runs done on wider aspect ratios. Another interesting mechanic was the screen wipe animations. It turned out to be possible to interact with most station elements before the screen had finished moving into place, and in some cases it was tricky to figure out where I needed to click to get the result I wanted. Oddly, moving one station to the left results in an animation one frame faster than moving one station to the right.

Once again, I created a custom swf to simulate different RNG outcomes so I’d know how many extra Math.random() calls I’d need to insert to get the customers I wanted each day (done here by placing toppings), alongside a custom version of Ruffle that spat random values into the console to help assist with the process. While the RNG I needed for this run was relatively flexible - it didn’t really matter which 1-topping and 2-topping customers I got as long as Kingsley was included - I still tried to aim for customers with pizzas that would take less time to prepare as an additional challenge. Unfortunately, I was just barely unable to get the outcome I was looking for on Day 5 - Kingsley, Taylor, Rita and Timm - and had to settle for an outcome with Tohru instead of Taylor. While this didn’t lose any time, the experience did make me wary of the difficulties I might face TASing a longer category for this game.

libTAS doesn’t currently support multi-touch input, and I’m not sure to what extent ruffle does either. I’m not sure how useful that would be for a TAS of this particular category, but it’s worth mentioning here as something that could potentially lead to an optimisation improvement in the future.

I was really surprised by how much time I was able to save over the RTA world record of this category. I noticed sub-10 was a possibility early on in the process, but I wasn’t expecting to get all the way down to sub-9. I’ll be really surprised if another Rank 5 TAS ends up being this short.

(frame 11136)

A special thank you to the Ruffle developers for getting this and other AIR games working in the emulator, without which this TAS would not have been possible. I’m excited to see submissions of mobile game TASes become a possibility on TASVideos, even if in a limited form.

eien86: Claiming for judging.

eien86: Replacing with faster movie uploaded by the author.

eien86: Papa's Pizzeria To Go! is a remake of Papas Pizzeria for mobile devices. Here, the author reaches rank 5 (the default category for this remake, achieving this goal much faster than the current RTA WR thanks to superhuman execution and RNG manipulation.

The game has no ending per se, although one can go up to rank 68, which might be considered a soft ending. There is also the All Ingredients category that might fit a full completion category better. Although rank 5 meets neither end, it cannot be considered a completion category, but since it is a popular RTA category, and there's player consensus, it can be accepted nevertheless.

Accepting to Alternative

fsvgm777: Processing.