Submission #8960: Mikewillplays's Flash One Button Vania in 08:56.67

About the game

The movie

Routing

Bosses

Bat

This is the first boss. The way the Bat thing works is pretty simple. After every hit, there is a delay where the bat wont try to attack you but it will follow you. I always jumped in a way to get the earliest attack possible.

Cencur

This is the first boss that is RNG dependent, the positions where he teleports are completely random, and they can only be manipulated through time. I tried to take the most optimal path possible through the light posts, but the most optimal path was impossible due to the fact that he teleported midway through the path, forcing me to go through a slower path.

Eye King

This boss is just a simple race, I tried making it as fast as I could, but if there's one area that could possibly be improved, it's this boss. I tried skipping it by clipping into the ceiling, but there's an invisible wall that just drops you to the left side, softlocking you until the Eye wins the race.

Plant Monster

The least interesting boss, I just drop as early as possible every time. However, in the first hit, I somehow found a way to slow down the Knight in the last jump, allowing me to jump earlier and save three frames, I could now find a way to do this for the other hits.

Skeleton Pirate

The only boss fight to be skipped. The way the actual fight works is that there are mines dropping from five holes, and what you have to do is go to these holes and lure the skeleton into attacking you, making it unintentionally hitting the mines, it wouldn't have been a long boss fight, but skipping it is obviously faster.

The Clown

The final boss is pretty interesting. The way it works it that one the three points in his hat will randomly flash, and you have to hit them with your sword to damage him, every time you damage him this repeats until he dies. If you take too long, a different point will start to flash. The thing that makes this fight unique isn't the problem of hitting the points as fast as possible, the problem is moving in a way so that you can hit them on the first frame possible, I was able to do this almost every time, aside from the first one and one where I unfortunately had to wait a few frames.

Glitches

Out-of-Bounds

In this game, the walls, ceiling and floor don't extend past the loading zones, that means if you find a way to enter these areas, you can do some wild stuff, one of the examples in the TAS is the lantern skip in the fire area, where by using a shield, I'm able to prolong the time spent out of bounds, allowing me to go through an area I was not supposed to enter yet.

Loading position manipulation

By jumping or landing from a jump before a loading zone on some areas, you can enter the next room higher or lower, which opens the gates for potential tricks. Unfortunately (depending on how you look at it) it ended up being used way less that I thought it would. The jumping version was used to enter the wind area without the lantern, and the landing one was only used in the beginning area for playaround.

Floor clip in the beginning

The second floor clip in the beginning area is very odd, this is because of the fact that if you land from a jump, you'll sometimes clip through the floor. My theory is that the platform is really thin, and the gravity is strong enough to push you down to the point of clipping through the floor, it didn't save time, but it looked cool.

Ceiling clip/Upwarp

This is definitely the most useful glitch in the game, it allows for many tricks to be performed, but first, I should explain how it works. The first step is to enter inside of a ceiling from below, this can be done in many ways, those being using the cloud, swimming, using the flowers or even just regular jumping. When successfully performed, two things can happen: You either change direction, which is already useful, and clipping through ceiling, these are called "upwarps". When you enter a ceiling from below far enough, the game warps you to the top of said ceiling, and there's no limit for how high it could be (I got upwarps as high as three screens). This is used a lot of times in the run, it allows for the much faster completion of the underwater area.

Potential time saves

Armor Games splash screen

The version I used for this game has a splash screen from Armor Games that lasts for 200 frames, I could've instead used a version of the .swf file that doesn't have this screen. However, I don't really count this as time loss, mostly because it's something completely out of your control and has nothing to do with the TASing process.

Faster Cencur

I was really dumb for not realizing this, but before the Cencur room, the key animation allows me to use the shield. I could've used the shield to delay the entrance to the arena frame by frame, allowing me to manipulate the boss without wasting too much time and allowing me to do the better path.

Corner Boosts

By jumping in a corner, you sometimes get pushed slightly to the direction you were walking. I only started using them in the green area, but since each corner boost only saves a frame and the fact that they are only possible sometimes, this means it wouldn't have saved much time if I knew it from the beginning.

Potential Ceiling clip

In the room before the water area, you can clip through the ceiling by letting a cloud rise and clip you through the ceiling (this is what it looks like). I was unable to replicate this, and after some testing, I figured out that it was an issue in Ruffle itself that prevented me from performing it, I was forced to use a slower (but still fast) method for clipping. This trick is only possible on the standalone Flash Player. It would save roughly half a second.

Extras

Thanks

Thanks to the people who helped me set up libTAS, I've had the idea of TASing this game for a while, and this TAS would never be made without them.

Suggested screenshot

Frame 2592.