Submission #2957: cetaka's GBA Turbo Turtle Adventure in 18:36.07

Items

• Jump
  • TAS precision makes this a lot more powerful than the level designers probably could have forseen.
• Brick
  • Placing bricks diagonally is surprising effective considering its relative feasibility in real time.
• Gold helmet
  • Increases your max speed by 1 but doesn't change acceleration.
• Spike helmet
  • Lets you move with normal acceleration on ice (and other slippery floor tiles).
• Silver helmet
  • Allows passage through force fields.
• Teleport item
  • Moves you in the same fashion as a normal teleporter to a destination panel.

Techniques

• Holding B
  • Definitely not a glitch, but holding B increases your max speed by 1 without changing your acceleration.

• Double jump
  • There is one frame when you can jump again immediately after jumping regardless of whether or not there is solid ground under you.

• Arrow panel manipulation
  • Entering an arrow panel from the edge reduces the acceleration or deceleration caused by the panel (usually I only want to reduce the deceleration when I'm moving against it).

• Not triggering breakable floor
  • It is possible to move over breakable floors without causing them to disappear. I have no idea how to charactercize how or when this happens but it's not too hard to get it to work.

• Bouncing
  • When you hit a wall your speed in the relevant direction(s) halve and change sign. This is often used to get up to a higher speed when coming out of a turn, especially when there isn't enough room to fully accelerate in the relevant direction.

• Optimized teleports
  • While in transit between warps you move at a constant speed of 5 in both directions until you enter a certain range of pixels (so in particular there are only 5 pixels you can end up on for each coordinate). It is often convenient to start the warp closer to the destination warp to save transit time, or start it at a pixel that will put you on the desired edge of the destination range.

• Force field skipping
  • Whenever a force field doesn't have walls protecting it from both sides I can usually skirt around the edge of it without having to get a silver helmet.

• Left/right and up/down
  • Unfortunately all this does is reduce your acceleration in the relevant direction to zero (your speed itself is still affected by all other gameplay elements).

Levels

• World 1
  • Nothing too special. Generally when the exit is 'just out of reach', as in 1-6, there's a way to get to it with an accurate jump.

• World 2
  • In 2-4 it's almost possible to move directly to the exit with the jump and two bricks but all the subpixel optimization I could apply still put me too far away to deem possible with my current knowledge.

• World 3
  • In 3-7 there's a pretty silly easter egg. Being able to move through the four up arrow panels to get the extra jump would potentially let me skip the entire maze part of the level by jumping straight to where the exit portal is but again it doesn't seem possible (though it would be if those stone barriers weren't there along the sides).

• World 4
  • In 4-4 I time the use of the silver helmet so that it expires just as I exit the force field; this gives me a slight boost into the exit portal and saves a few frames. I was hoping to do that a lot more but in most cases there aren't ten seconds (the duration of the helmet) between when I get the helmet to when I pass through the force field.
  • I wish they would just give me four jumps (like in 4-6) more often :(
  • In 4-7 I stand still next to the key door before moving into it for so long because I have to wait for the fan to push me in at a monstrous rate of 1 subpixel per 2 frames. As such I tried to minimize the distance I needed to get pushed, but it's still probably far from optimized. Clipping through the door is slow enough that it doesn't save more than ~8 seconds over the route I had before, even though it lets me skip most of the level.

• World 5
  • These levels are pretty gross. You accelerate only 6 subpixels per frame per frame on ice compared to 32 on normal ground. As such, there is a lot of unintuitive bouncing off of walls that ends up saving time since being able to start moving in the other direction instantly is almost always faster than turning around painfully slowly. Bumpers also become very useful for changing direction.
  • In 5-4 it's possible to wedge yourself into the small room blocked by force fields from the left without using the silver helmet, but it requires a decent amount of speed that I couldn't get back up to once I was inside the room.

• World 6
  • I'm not sure how they arrived at the shape of the wall blob in 6-6 separating the spawn point from the exit but I guess they should have made it a little bigger!

• World 7
  • Bat Cavern: Official Home of Hollow Diagonal Walls (TM). As with key doors, exiting the walls is very slow and but this still saves ~3 seconds in 7-1 and ~35 seconds in 7-3 (where the bulk of the level is skipped).
  • 7-4 is skipped since the credits are trigged just by completing 7-7.
  • I assume that the route in 7-5 is not intended since there is a lot of other stuff in the map, so I guess it was just overlooked as a possibility (it's very easy to pull off in real time).
  • The key door skip in 7-7 saves having to retraverse the maze, as does the beginning of the level where I pick up the blue key to use on an unintended door.