Submission #8185: Spikestuff's Flash One Chance "Alone in Lab" in 06:00.17

Some sequences might not be comfortable to some users, proceed with caution.

Nothing...

So, as Dr. Pilgrim, what would you do in your last 6 days on earth?
We end our time at the lab, alone with our thoughts. Shit.

Immediately out of the gate, I need to go through the prerequisites, this is a modified flash file.
It is modified due to the non-deterministic loading thanks to the Newgrounds API.
You cannot nuke the internet, as that will result in a longer load in Ruffle comparatively to flash which loads the title instantly.

So how does one remove things and what's removed?
Firstly you need JPEXS Free Flash Decompiler. After grabbing a clean version of the game only 2 things need to be adjusted, both need to be removed.

Under the "frames" folder in frame 1, remove:
PlaceObject2 (32: Preloader Bar (NewgroundsAPI))(:Preloader Bar (NewgroundsAPI)) Depth: 9

Under the "scripts" folder in frame 1, remove:
DoAction. Specifically the one that has "stop ();"

This will get the game running immediately without issue.
A bonus for future encoders/publishers if the video ever gets taken down remove "DefineSounds (538)" from the sounds folder.

Anyways, despite looking simple of a game where you just hold right, as I found out 2 years after the WR the game has speedtech.
By going into Molly's Room and the Bathroom you shave a few frames compared to not doing this:

feos: Claiming for judging.

feos: Here's a table showing how unique the endings are. Blue is something unique across all branches, red is something unique for that day, and orange is something less common for that day.

Unlike with #7813: TheAmazingYucemu's Flash Henry Stickmin 5: Fleeing the Complex "no refresh" in 08:34.00, there's no way to complete the game using several mostly different routes consisting of entirely different rooms. Most routes here are either highly common or less common. So we can't treat every ending as a separate game mode and publish them separately.

But much like in Henry Stickmin 5, an "all endings" goal that includes failure endings can work as a full completion goal, because it maximizes objectively unique content of the game (the endings themselves).

Since you can't restart the game from scratch (your ending persists across sessions, which is why it's called "One Chance"), and libTAS can't prevent the game from registering your ending even with writing to disk disabled, the only way to have an "all endings" movie right now would be to further modify the game to remove its save code.

Hacking the game just to fit Movie Rules (simply because we're already hacking it anyway) may sound like a hacky solution in itself, but basically we're simulating disabling local storage access which Adobe Flash Player can do, and Ruffle can't.

Yet individual failure branches of this game should not get automatically rejected, because together they represent something we otherwise don't have yet. Which means Playground for them all for now.

Whether they get superseded by "all endings" is to be decided when it appears. A potential argument for that is that we wouldn't keep every failure ending separately for Henry Stickmin 5 for example if there's already a branch that includes all those failure endings. Because otherwise the amount of Playground branches would get unreasonably huge, while not having anything unique compared to the full thing.

Currently these branches aim for shortest input and as a result they may end differently than if they were all merged together, for example one could run into the knife in #8183: Spikestuff's Flash One Chance "Murdered" in 05:12.21. But on the other hand that's just a matter of how we want to end the movie: by "dropping the controller" ASAP or by making the game end ASAP. An "all endings" movie would aim for the latter. Whether it makes sense to preserve individual Playground branches that aim for the former, is, again, to be decided. At the very least I can understand keeping the ones where it makes a difference.

Another thing to be decided is whether "all endings" should obsolete "best ending", maybe we agree to get rid of the supersede mechanic when it comes to Standard branches. I don't know.

In any case, I'm sending these 5 submissions to Playground: