Introduction
Tents and Trees is a 2021 homebrew puzzle game for the Fairchild Channel F developed by Arlasoft. The game is kind of a more restricted Picross where the goal is to have each row and column have a certain number of tents. The restriction comes from tents requiring a tree next to them for a space to be valid.
So BizHawk 2.10 was (as of 14 January 2025) recently released and I wanted to try out one of the new cores. I came across this game on RetroAchievements and thought it would make for an interesting TAS challenge.
Run notes
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.10
- Puzzle game
- Plays all levels until the loop point
Game notes
This goal of this game was to exhaust all available puzzles as the game seems to loop through the last 3 puzzles indefinitely after each one has been played. At least, that's what I'm pretty sure is happening since I did get the mastery on RA and noticed this happening when going for the achievement for beating 50 levels. Thus, this TAS stops after completing level 24 as no new levels show up after that point.
There are a fair number of levels where there are multiple correct solutions as the game simply checks that each row and column has the right number of tents. This makes it a bit more freeform than standard Picross where those normally have the one solution without ambiguity in correct spaces. The multiple solutions makes routing a bit more interesting since some solutions can be faster, though usually a frame but sometimes more.
Cursor movement is just the cardinal directions without screen wrapping so distance to each space usually just requires Manhattan distance. However, since any space at least two spaces away in a given cardinal direction requires a blank input for each direction press, this can mean that any distance between two nodes that have both different X and Y coordinates can potentially be the same as two nodes that merely have just an X or Y coordinate difference if that distance is at least 2 spaces away.
Anyways, I hope to show off some more interesting games (or at least, interesting to me) for this year!
