Gameplay Objectives
- Fastest Completion
- Uses death to save time
Overview
Böbl is a homebrew NES game developed by Morphcat Games for the NESdev Compo 2019. It is a nonlinear, metroidvania-lite platformer. You play as a little bubble, explore a collection of interconnected rooms, collect power ups to improve your movement and find rubber ducks to add to your collection. This TAS uses the 1.1 version of the game because it's a more complete version and doesnt have the crutch of being rushed to make a deadline for the contest.
This might possibly be the first BizHawk submission that was made using the Linux version of BizHawk.
Edit: turns out Juef beat us to the punch on that
Route
At the start, our bubble can only live in water, and landing on any other kind of terrain pops the bubble, sending us back to the latest checkpoint bell we rang. Aside from moving laterally, we can sink in water up to a certain depth by holding A or Down, and releasing it makes us buoyant again, giving us acceleration forward and allowing us a “jump” between bodies of water.
Three powerups are required to beat the game:
- Dive Ball - increases how far we can sink in water, indirectly increasing our jump height too.
- Iron Ball - allows for unlimited sinking and diving in water. Also allows the bubble to bounce off of solid ground once before touching water again.
- Double Jump - allows for a small midair jump by tapping the B button.
We can quickly collect Dive Ball from our starting location, and then we head towards the Iron Ball upgrade. On our way, we run into clear pipes. Clear pipes can carry the bubble across. Weirdly, it appears that they take a variable amount of time to suck the bubble towards the pipe. Optimizing these suctions was a large consideration.
Once we navigate thru the pipes we get Iron Ball. With it, we can take a convenient shortcut towards the deeper area of the map and navigate to the Double Jump update. Here we use an intentional death to quickly respawn at a convenient checkpoint after collecting the update, avoiding a large amount of backtracking. From here, we double jump to make it thru the final gate and reach the final section.
The sky has almost no water bodies but it has clouds. Clouds won’t kill us if we bounce off of them. Interestingly enough, we can also increase our bounce height by using the Iron Ball on our way down, gaining momentum which we can preserve. This is the key mechanic that allows us to climb most vertical screens in this section.
The game is short but nice. It has a well-defined ending (so it's complete) and it is a wholly original game. The movie seems well made, no obvious flaws. One potential weakness is that the TAS is only a few seconds faster than the non-tool assisted speedrun, but the gameplay is definitely not trivial, so I don't think it is a big issue. A 100% run, maybe deathless, could perhaps offer greater difference over the non-tool assisted speedrun.
In all, I am accepting this!
