User Files from Induviel

Interesting homebrew, most of the game is just moving right so most of the optimization there comes from lag reduction, this game lags a lot, and killing enemies also create more lag, so wether you kill an enemy or not really comes down to checking if its worth in that specific situation, and in some cases its faster to take a hit to get a projectile off the screen faster, which is the reason a random hit is taken on the Ghostface bossfight, for example, to prevent one rogue lag frame.

Also, found a few gitches, like a double jump, tho it only gives a slight jump height increase, or a way to clip through the top of some blocks.

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Fun game.

Up to halfway stage 4, seems like probably some will have to be redone to save up health for the rest of the stage, and the boss, and some of the next stage, since the next health is about a quarter in stage 5, so I'll leave it here for a bit.

Damageless would have been a better goal probably, wouldn't have to fuzz about frames that could be saved from taking even more damage.

Funny game. Found a small optimization where you can cover slightly more per jump if you crouch around the end of a jump, saves a smidge each time, other than that, its all standard. Anyway, there's a lot of RNG in this game, having to get the speed boost as soon as possible in every level, plus either the fireball or the thunder powerups to deal with enemies faster while not losing health, or at least not as much. Some frames are lost before starting the game to get good RNG and get the fireball and the gauntlets at the start. The world version is used for the faster start screen btw.

4 stages done.

Just figured out the version I'm using is not the fastest, the J version doesn't have the time bonus at the end of each stage, so that should save time, the USA version also doesn't have it, but the startup sequence takes longer. So, will have to resync on the J version.

Edit: Actually, the J version also has the time bonus I guess? I was going off the WR, which didn't get the time bonus, I guess you just get it if you are fast enough, guess I'll instead have to check how much slower I'd have to go to not get the bonus, and see if that's faster overall. Tho, checkimg the J version, it did have sound, which is weird since the other two versions didn't, and I thought it was just something weird with my laptop, will have to check that. Could someone let me know of this has no audio, or is it just on me? If it doesn't switching to J shouldn't be too hard anyway.

Edit2: Managed to get audio, changed some sync settings back and forth and now its the same as before, but with audio, bad news tho, it desyncs if I just copy paste this wholesale on a tasproj with audio, so thats fun, at least that means I get to have audio on the World version, which has the faster startup sequence.

Completed up to after beating the 2nd boss, didn't find any good glitch to speed this up much, there are some spots where I go straight through certain hazards but nothing groundbreaking, so this will probably be a very vanilla TAS, if I manage to finish it, it's kind of long.
Might have to change this a bit to check wether getting the health up from the shop is faster overall or not, it should allow for more damage boosts, but its 50 curio, so some time will be lost farming for curio later on, appart from the time lost going to the shop and buying it. But anyway, I think I'd have to first TAS the whole game without the health up, then again with it to really make sure which is faster.

Finally done redoing the first 2 missions using analog controls, managed to save a good amount of frames from the faster and more precise turning.
It's still done painfully vanilla, with no actual skips or glitches, I'm not that good at finding those unless they are blindingly obvious so that was expected, tho I'll still try to find something if possible.

Here's a quick encode.

Encode looks like shit, and not just because the graphics are not that good, not sure how I can make it better tho.

Discovered this game from it being mentioned on the NES Whishlist forum, I thought I'd wait for the game to come out, since its still unreleased, but messing around in the demo I found a bunch of stuff that would probably make for a fun TAS, so I had to.

The game can be found here
https://megacatstudios.com/pages/the-meating

Does someone here know if a TAS of this demo would be submittable? If so I'd probably have to optimize it further tho.

Finally finished Mission 2, that's the longest one in the game, and the only one that forces stealth, so the rest should be easier, depends on if just sprinting through enemies is possible without them gunning you down.

Here's a quick encode.

I've wanted to TAS a 3D game for a while, this one seems simple enough. Haven't found any glitches, yet, only things I've found by now is that jumping is slightly faster than running, tho you need a lot of space, and the more you hold L/R the faster the camera turns, up to max camera speed, so you can preemtively hold L/R even when not being able to move to build up camera speed to turn faster.

Also, kind of crazy how much harder optimizing 3D is compared to 2D, even way harder than I initially thought.

Here's a quick encode.

If someone sees something that looks unoptimal please share.

Haven't been able to find a better route, so I tried optimizing further, 7 more frames off, there's probably more frames to save somewhere. This only makes sense to submit if its actually perfect, since its so short.

The input after the gem warp is still by Spikestuff, slightly modified to make it sync.

Looking at the level map Spikestuff linked to on the other userfile, I thought of another route that could be potentially faster, and it was. Basically, instead of descending to the first gem on the previous route, you go right and jump down to a lower track, then jump to the second gem. Main timesave here is the fact that you pick up the trail segment along the way, speeding up the section after the gem warp.

Still some frames to save, but its getting more optimal, this is probably the fastest route, unless there's some faster way of reaching the gem, maybe somehow clipping through the tracks.

Found out that those big emerald things warp you around if you jump on them somewhat specifically, not sure if its a glitch or intended. Anyway, found a different route using this tech where you do that twice, saving a good amount of frames, this is just a rough test to check if it was actually faster, so its very unoptimal, since you are warping around you can't see what's going on, and I didn't want to try optimizing where I don't see anything.

That clip glitch is very useful on level 4 specially, skips most of the level, the specific kind of ledges you need for the clip are not that common tho. Figuring out ways to clip on different geometry should be able to skip a lot more. The spikes clip mentioned on Forum/Topics/14226 could be a way, but I haven't had any luck recreating it yet.

Can't figure out how to make a fire orb drop before the boss unfortunately. Probably won't continue this.

Edit: Thought of this recently. Managed to find some slight improvements that changed the RNG to a better one, where I do get one just before the boss on the 3rd level, unfortuunately, for the fastest boss strategy I need to do a spin attack, get hit by colliding with the boss, one of the orbs in the boss drop a new fire orb, and another spin attack kills all orbs very fast. Problem is, I don't get any fire orbs from the orbs that die in the first attack, very unlucky.
I might just try to TAS the Best Ending and hope the RNG lines up magically, because I cannot figure out what really changes the RNG in this game.

FYI, for those who care about this game, a legion, I'm sure, the improvements are, in the first bossfight, you can, for some reason, deal damage to the boss one frame earlier than you'd think in every attack, the stun animation gets wonky and gets invulnerability frames while not stunned, but it works out. And second, in the 2nd boss, I manged to squeeze in one more hit in the first change you have to damage the boss, so in the second you can lure them so it stops higher up, and a jump attack kills the boss much faster than waiting for it to get to ground level.