Captain Viridian disappears from his ship, to which he then teleports back (kinda) and everybody is very happy to see him even though he was only gone for a few seconds.

So Scepheo made a run of VVVVVV and Masterjun saw it and he was like "bro, do you even optimize?" and Scepheo was like "optimize it urself" and Masterjun was like "k" and Scepheo was like "cool story bro" and then this happened.

We started this TAS when Masterjun pointed out that some of the movement in the previous TAS wasn't really optimal. While he was fixing that, he found the address for the game state (which you can (almost) all find here). Using that, we discovered that the game can be broken even more than we thought possible.

The only glitch still used in the run, text storage is what makes it all possible. The game does many transitions and events (teleporting, saving crew members, going back to the menu etcetera) by setting the game state to a given number. However, the game state is set (to, say, 10), a transition is started and some time later, the game state is read, used and set back to 0.

And during this transition is when the magic happens. If you exit to the menu while in a dialog, this "dialog state" (which you can discern by the "Press ACTION to advance text" message at the top of the screen) doesn't go away. This allows us to alter the game state during transitions.

The first transition occurs together with getting storage. As soon as the game enters the dialog state, we suicide and exit to the menu. During this transition, the game state becomes 80. Normally this just continues into the menu, but we increment it to 94, which is used to start the Space Station 2 time trial. As such, we're warped to the start of Space Station 2.

From here, we go to the two closest teleporters and get text storage from the terminal. We then teleport, which uses a variety of game states between 4000 and 4058. Which we then manipulate up to 4080, which triggers the ending sequence. Game completed.

So I guess this is why you make WIPs? Masterjun managed to get better movement and found the game state address, which made a lot of the manipulation possible. Breaking the game even further was great fun though, and we discovered quite a few amazing, broken and hilarious things that you, unfortunately, don't see in the TAS. Thank you Masterjun for doing this with me, it was a pleasure.

Hello! When I first saw that new VVVVVV submission which was under 1 minute I couldn't really believe it. But I soon realized that games can get veery confused when multiple things are happening at the same time. Scepheo and I played around with the game even more and he found faster and faster routes. I had a lot of fun working with you Scepheo and thanks for the submission text I didn't want to write xD.

feos: Accepting as a new branch and publishing...