im too tired to write a full description right now. i might come back and update this later. it's not like theres anything too complicated here though, there aren't any tricks and there's only a few clever optimizations. one thing about this game is that if you land on the ground and then walk off a ledge on the next frame, the game lets you keep all your falling momentum. this lets you enter the sewers quicker by doing a frame perfect input to open the grate. most of the early bossfights can be done without slowing down at all. pipe worker is a hard bossfight, but it can be beaten without slowing down with perfectly timed damage boosts, and by moving to the right side of the bullet box so that you can move past the bullets as soon as possible. since the bullets are fired towards you, you have to carefully manipulate their positions so that they don't get in your way during the chain attack. in crown smith, you get the ability to block pink bullets by pressing z. this ability causes you to move at half speed, which is kind of annoying but it also allows me to fine tune my position and dodge bullets more precisely. in pacemaker, im able to squeeze through the line of bullets in the middle of the screen without taking damage by pressing z and then moving over by a half pixel. blueprint was the hardest boss to optimize by far. it has a lot of rng, the bullets at the start of each attack cycle are almost impossible to dodge, and it can only be dodged at the corners. i fortunately found a movement pattern that let me avoid taking damage a second time in the first attack that only cost me one frame, and having an extra damage boost simplified the rest of the fight.
eien86: Claiming for judging.
eien86: The submission is visibly optimized. The author repeatedly takes damage during the boss fights to save time. As a result this movie beats the current RTA best time by quite a margin.
As precedent for future PICO-8 submissions: they need to include the required information specified here in the submission notes. This is crucial to achieve sync and omitting them will result in additional effort from all sides and indefinite delays.
Especially for the case of `foreground_sleep_ms`, which was the reason this movie desynced for me. The provided configuration did not contain the correct value, which left me chasing my tail. Thankfully, fsvgm777 was able to find out that this was the problem and we could sync it.
The experience with this submission also brought to light the issue that PICO-8 does not archive older versions. So players are now urged to use the latest version of the virtual console whenever possible.
Accepting to Standard
despoa: Processing... For future encoders,
foreground_sleep_ms in the PICO-8 configuration file must be set to 5 instead of 2 for this run.