Submission #8851: LoganTheTASer & Induviel's Genesis Tom and Jerry: Frantic Antics! in 05:28.51

Tom and Jerry: Frantic Antics! is a platformer loosely based on the 1992 movie “Tom and Jerry”, which is in turn based on the world-famous titular characters. Your mission is to stop Aunt Figg from keeping Robyn Starling hostage and return her to her father. (Robyn, not Aunt Figg)

This is a 15.42 second improvement over https://tasvideos.org/5722M mainly thanks to some new innovations from speedrunner JeffSpeed, but also thanks to better movement optimisation, a faster fight with Aunt Figg and a clever trick to end the final level faster.

By jumping every frame we land consecutively, we can shift Tom/Jerry to the far sides of the screen. This saves a considerable amount of time over the course of the run. The characters’ jump will be slower if you don’t wait before the acceleration has finished.

If you jump, then throw an item after letting go of B, then jump again in a relatively short window, it’s possible to jump off of an item to gain more height. This can be used for some big shortcuts, especially in The Alley, where it saves nearly 2 minutes over taking the intended route and the level is finished in well under 20 seconds.

For some reason, some of the walls weren’t coded to stop the player moving when hitting them, and as a result, we can run out of bounds and perform several more shortcuts.

By jumping at a very specific height a frame before we would hit the staircase, we can clip through one of the stairs. This is used as a shortcut to the 1st telegram piece in The Library, saving 7-8 seconds.

Instead of waiting for Aunt Figg to fall off screen after we’ve defeated her, we can keep jumping to the right and scroll her off screen. This trick was found by Induviel and saves nearly a second.

This was also found by Induviel. For this to work, we need Tom/Jerry’s X position to be as close to the ladder is possible. Then we keep pressing R for 1 frame and then L for 3 frames with 8 frame intervals inbetween.

If we’re airborne for large amounts of time, Tom/Jerry’s X speed slows down drastically, so we want to reduce how long we’re airborne for.

Turning around straight away makes Tom/Jerry slide on the ground, taking a long time. Instead, it’s faster to turn around 5 frames after landing. This gets rid of that animation and makes us accelerate nearly instantly.

5 frames saved from not landing on a staircase, which previously resulted in a loss of speed.

7 frames saved from a new route across the level which didn’t require as much time being airborne.

471 frames (7.86 seconds) saved from clipping through a staircase to get to the 1st telegram piece faster, as well as faster movement from redoing the level.

131 frames (2.18 seconds) saved from not having to climb the platforms, as we use 2 objects to boost ourselves to the control panel faster, one of the leftover items is discarded before the item jumps at the end of the level since you can throw an item before the previous one has collided if you have no items in between, which is important to make that climb.

98 frames (1.64 seconds) saved from using 2 objects instead of the hat rack to get to a platform above, using the new ladder zipping trick and bouncing off of the bed and using an object to get over the stack of crates earlier.

212 frames (3.54 seconds) saved from many different optimisations, including better movement from redoing the level, a faster platform climbing route, climbing the ladder on the right side instead of the left, a faster fight with Aunt Figg and scrolling the screen to the right to end the level 50 frames faster. A few frames were initially lost in the making of the final draft due to random lag, but Induviel managed to save more than enough frames to make up for that.

Induviel agreed to do the 2nd half of The Cabin as I was struggling with the optimisation there, which is why I’ve added him as a co-author. While he was at it, he also found small improvements to other levels and studied the TAS very hard through its production. He also made the encode.

That’s all from us. Thanks for reading.

ThunderAxe31: Claiming for judging.

ThunderAxe31: File replaced with a 65 frames improvement, and accepting as improvement over the current publication.

fsvgm777: Processing.