Shovel Knight is a 2D platform game with retro style released in 2014, and inspired by mechanics from NES platform games. It initially features Shovel Knight as the playable character, but then received additional campaigns with other playable characters.
The above video contains commentaries as subtitles. Also, you may notice that the time in the video differs from the submitted time. This TAS was done on an older version of libTAS. Resyncing to the current one resulted in loosing 29 frames. I was lazy to redo a full encode.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: libTAS v1.3.1
- Syncs on Ubuntu 18.04 amd64 with Linux kernel 4.13.0-36-generic
- Finish the game with Shovel Knight campaign
- Aims for fastest real time
- Take damage to save time
- Genre: Platform
Tricks
Jump cancel
Jumping cancels a lot of animations: slash, relics with the throw animation (coin, gear), end of the Knuckles animation.
As a consequence, slashes and relics are usually done in the air, and are canceled with Shovel Knight lands by jumping again. It also allows to chain slashes by canceling a slash after it hits by a jump and starting another slash instantly.
Quick Charge
Charge Handle upgrade gives Shovel Knight the ability to charge a slash. When holding the attack button, Shovel Knight does a normal slash, and then charges a powerful slash. By canceling the slash by a jump, Shovel Knight instantly starts to charge, which allows to cut a part of the animation.
Thanks
Huge thanks to the Shovel Knight discord community for their feedback, advices and enthusiasm!
Suggested screenshots: 90824, 124997
feos: Every day I'm shoveling! Synced/judging...
feos: So I synced it on Lubuntu 18.04, Kernel x86_64 Linux 4.15.0-20-generic. Attempts on other distros failed because I decided to disable vsync in the game menu, but it otherwise runs fine on Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Debian, even 32-bit.
Ubuntu 18.04 is stable, so we're fine, but I found out there's no easy way to even run libTAS on stable Debian (Stretch), because it depends on packages only available for Buster+. But Ubuntu happens to use packages from Debian Sid, which are considered unstable for Debian, though apparently stable for Ubuntu. Installing packages from Sid to Stretch also works, but it requires some surgery, and I wouldn't want to accept a movie if it only ran with unstable dependencies. Anyway, since coincidentally unstable Debian packages are stable for Ubuntu, we're fine.
Full completion can be decided on in a thread if needed, independently of this judgment.
Great feedback, great movie, congratulations, and accepting to Moons!
