Robot Wants Kitty is the first installment of a short Metroidvania series developed by Hamumu, later evolved to mobile remakes and a full-fledged PC game titled Robot Wants It All.
- Emulator used: libTAS 1.4.7 + Ruffle nightly 2026-01-26 compiled with
cargo build --package=ruffle_desktop --release
- Also syncs on Ruffle nightly 2024-09-01, though the main menu may look jumbled.
- Option:
--no-gui -g gl
- SWF MD5 hash: 4cf10fe9e788bbcc05f77785e2f5ea6c
Game objectives
- Fastest completion (RTA)
- Takes damage to save time
Basic Mechanism
Movement & Attack
Walking and jumping has acceleration and bumping into walls or ceilings reset the speed, so standard techniques like jumping off ledges apply. I feel like the hitbox is a bit larger than it seems. Jumping height cannot be controlled, and is slightly lower than 3 blocks high.
After obtaining the gun, the robot can shoot every 18 frames. There is an optional item that makes shooting faster, which is not picked up in this run because it requires a long detour.
The map can be found
here.
Enemy Behavior
A red enemy takes 3 shots to kill, and changes direction each time getting hit. This fact is important in manipulating those enemies' positions.
The game is run in a single large room, where all enemies move simultaneously. As a result, each improvement may require re-syncing the run to account for differences in enemy positions.
Tricks & Glitches
TAS starts to get wild after obtaining the horizontal rocket due to various quirks and glitches, not to mention its ludicrous speed as the game itself describes:
- While using the rocket, the robot descends very slowly.
- You can "jump" while using the rocket, but it immediately gets cancelled in the next frame. However, you can jump as much as you want, even once every frame by alternating two jump buttons.
- With a frame perfect jumping as the rocket turns off, you can jump mid-air without being cancelled. This also works when you double-jumped beforehand, so you can essentially triple-jump if you're hugging a wall.
- With a frame perfect shooting, you can kill an enemy while using the rocket. Horizontal position has to be aligned well though, so it doesn't always work.
0:15 - I hoped to hit the ceiling and land on the next step of the stair, but that doesn't seem to be possible. What lies ahead is a checkpoint, which I avoid for a better respawn point at 0:22.
0:24 - I position each shot so that this enemy moves to the left for as long as possible. This pattern appears again in 2:07.
0:47 - To jump exactly 3-block high, press two different jump buttons on two consecutive frames.
1:00 - Double jump isn't enough when there's a 2-block ceiling like this.
1:18 - This area can be shot in 0:50, but both enemies are around the upper half at that point so they can't be killed.
1:34 - Vertical position with rockets is very hard to control precisely, which makes optimal jumping difficult to figure out, especially in this large open area. To deal with the red enemy positioned near the cliff at 1:36, I rocket diagonally near the top middle block. There may be better alternative routes.
1:52 - I shoot this enemy so that in 2:09, both enemies are well-positioned to hover over with a single rocket, instead of a rocket and then a double jump.
1:54 - Vertical rocket can't be cancelled, so I have to wait for it before using the horizontal rocket.
2:00 - A red gate is opened off-screen. Opening a gate resets horizontal speed.
2:04 - I touch the ground for 1 frame so that I can rocket while falling down and thus reset the falling speed. The two enemies are closer to each other than in 1:18.
2:06 - I wait for the cycle of the three red enemies below. Any potential improvement before this point would be bottlenecked by this area until 20 more frames are saved, at which point I could start saving time by taking out the leftmost enemy (which takes 54 frames, and I stalled for 34 frames).
2:08 - Things happen in an instant and off-screen. What's happening here is I rocket right next to the pickup to collect it and die at the same time, respawn and rocket to the block that is 1-block higher (see 1:51), then rocket upwards.
Potential Improvements
Refer to the comments at 1:34 and 2:06.
Human Comparison
By RTA timing, this submission beats the game in around 2:08. Human world record is
2:50 by mikerspd.
Note that IGT can't be compared since this game doesn't actually use a standard timer: the game subtracts 1 second each time an enemy dies and adds 20 seconds each time the robot dies. An IGT run would look substantially different from this one.
Samsara: I put a bit of time into learning the route for this game a long while back for RTA runs but never got anywhere with it, so I'm happy to see it absolutely shattered with a TAS. Excellent work, especially in making the rocket's speed even more ludicrous over the latter half of the run. Accepting!
