Submission #8619: Merl_'s PICO8 SnowBall in 00:20.67

Note: I personally recommend watching this TAS at 0.5 or 0.25 speed. At full speed, I can't even track where the snowball goes.

Snowball is a 2D platformer where you control a snowball. You can roll on the ground to pick up snow and increase the size of the snowball, and roll down slopes to gather speed. The goal of each level is to make it to the flag, where you can press x to go to the next level. There are 7 levels in total.

Snowball speedruns use a variety of techniques to go fast.

By pressing down in midair, you get a downwards speed boost. You can do multiple fastfalls in a row in order to build up lots of falling speed, however you can't fastfall immediately after leaving the ground, you can only fastfall once your coyote frames are over.

When you roll off of the ground, you have a few frames where you can still do a jump. Because the TAS reaches such high speeds, the place it initiates the jump is often very disjointed from where the ground actually is. Late coyote jumps are used frequently throughout the TAS. For example, in level 4, the TAS does a last frame coyote jump to avoid landing in the fire and dying, and to avoid jumping into the ceiling.

Landing on a slope gives you a boost in the direction the slope is facing. By fastfalling onto a slope, you can get extremely large amounts of speed. You can also use slope boosts to turn around quickly, which is what the TAS does in level 7.

By fastfalling onto the edge of a block, you can generate even more speed than a slope boost can give. The TAS does two corner boosts in level 6. The TAS also does a vertical corner boost in level 2. By hitting the bottom corner of a block with a high horizontal speed, you can get boosted straight down, which helps the TAS fall into the flag a bit faster.

Sometimes, when you hit a wall, the game will allow you to perform a jump. This isn't used much in the TAS due to it being hard to perform and rarely useful, however there is a walljump in level 4 which halts the momentum the TAS got from the fastfall before hitting the right wall.

In general, I think that every level in this TAS can be improved, although I doubt I can do much better without more advanced tools like memory watch. Levels 5 and 7 are the most likely improvements because I mainly focused on just getting the strats to work.

This TAS is a 14.467 second improvement over the previous TAS by rythin: youtu.be/B_d5zv6mbnM

ikuyo: Claiming for judging.

ikuyo: Hello Merl_, and sorry for the delay in this judgement.

I originally thought such a short movie couldn't hold much of interest, but the game definitely holds a lot of nice tricks and exploits. Execution is generally clean, and due to the nature of the game as a physics-based platformer, I imagine optimizations will be hard to capitalize on without extensive reworks.

Nice work, accepting.

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