About a week ago I decided that it would be funny to make a TAS of my favourite visual novel. A completely linear game with no choices, and also a game made in Unity. Surely that part wouldn't cause me any headaches.

And so I present to you a TAS of Psycholonials, a now-free game made by the creator of Homestuck. The TAS primarily consists of mashing through dialogue as fast as possible, and pressing escape whenever a cutscene happens.

Sadly I couldn't get this done in time for April Fools', but I at least got it done in advance of 4/13 so there's that.

I've loved TASes for more than a decade now. I think the first time I tried to make one was with Bizhawk when I was 11 or so. A completely unoptimized run of SMB1, but I was proud of it. I knew it wasn't any good, but I was still amazed that I did it at all. Now, about a decade later, I'm finally submitting a finished TAS to this website.

I don't really have any additional comments on the gameplay. Pretty much a complete description can be found in the second paragraph at the top.

The version is the latest version you can download for Linux on Steam. The game hasn't been updated in almost five years, but in case it ever is the build number is 7231885.

If I'm correct about how TAS timing works, time starts on launch and ends on the last frame of input. If I'm correct, the game time is 23:51.100.

Sadly this isn't a completely optimized TAS, as I had to frequently add in delays following loading screens so that it wouldn't desync. Probably about 5 seconds or so could be saved if I had done all of these perfectly, but I'll gladly exchange the encode finishing without issue for that tiny delay.

Here's what I put in the annotations file for running the game:

Add the following arguments in command-line options:

-screen-width 1920 -screen-height 1080  -force-gfx-direct

Make a copy of (or symlink) <Psycholonials folder>/Psycholonials_Data/Resources/unity default resources to <Psycholonials folder>/Psycholonials_Data/Resources/unity_builtin_extra

Follow the instructions at https://clementgallet.github.io/libTAS/guides/unity/ (under the determinism subheading) for unity 2020.3.16f1 il2cpp

Make sure you don't have any game save files, which can be found at ~/.config/unity3d/TheSilenceMill/Psycholonials/. If you do, you won't get the language selection on boot, causing a desync.

This game has a few brief moments with flashing lights. Nothing too major but should still be noted.

If this does get approval for publishing, or even get a look enough for consideration, I have a version which is almost completely identical except the final input is delayed so the final time is 24:13.000, in reference to Homestuck. Which is why I'd also like to say that if it does get published, it'd be ideal if that were to happen on 4/13. Just because it'd be a fun celebration of that day.