"I know there isn't that much demand for photographs taken while running, but... you know, who cares? The world's a playground! You know that when you're a kid, but somewhere along the way, everyone forgets it." -- Allison, Yes Man
Table of contents
Description
Playground is an "anything goes" class, meant to hold a wide variety of creative TASes.
Please note that Playground is still in a very early state of implementation! This page is absolutely not final! It reflects our current thoughts and actions on Playground, and the page will change as time goes on and as more functionality supporting Playground is implemented on the site. If you have any suggestions or feedback, please post in this forum thread!
Overview
- Playground runs can theoretically have any goals, though the run's primary goal should be reasonable and worthwhile.
- In other words, a run should not be labeled as something like "standing still%" or "walks right for 42069 frames".
- Playground runs do not need to follow all of the Movie Rules.
- See the Requirements section for the few rules that must still be followed.
- Playground runs are not formally published to our YouTube channel.
- Due to the wide scope of what will be acceptable here, publication would overwork our Publishers and flood the channel as a result.
- PG runs will still receive prominent placement on the site, though. Encodes can be provided by the community or the author.
- Playground runs will be community curated.
- With the current implementation as of April 14th, 2022, they are being handled by the Judge team, but this is planned to change in the future as more features are discussed, refined, and implemented.
- Playground will never house all runs of any given game.
- PG is explicitly meant to handle nonstandard goals that are otherwise unpublishable. It should not be holding runs of "unpublishable games": We would much sooner change the rules to make those games publishable.
Requirements
- The game must be acceptable under Movie Rules on game choice.
- The run must be reasonably optimized.
- Standards may not be as high as they are for publications, but we still expect effort to be put into optimization. There should be no obviously visible sloppy play throughout the movie.
- The rerecording environment used must be available and supported.
- The TASVideos site has to be able to parse your movie file. If the format of your movie is currently not supported, contact Staff regarding adding that support.
- It must be possible for us to set up the tools you used for movie recording and playback. If it was made on an unofficial fork of some emulator, it must be documented what makes that fork different, and the build must be hosted on some reliable service. Contact Staff regarding making and hosting such a build.
- The run must sync, and reproduction steps must be provided if they are necessary for syncing.
- Input files must still be submitted. We will never accept runs that are only video files.
- Runs that use cheats or Lua scripts must provide said cheats or Lua scripts.
- Runs that start from an in-game save file (SRAM) or an emulator savestate must provide a verification movie that creates that save, or clear instructions on how to recreate it. The verification movie does not need to be optimized.
- The movie must be properly attributed.
Workflow
The goal is for Playground movies to be fully user-curated and featured on Game pages.
Until then, a judge claims a regular submission and makes a decision on it, sending it to Playground if it breaks some Movie Rules, but meets the requirements of Playground. That moves the submission thread to the dedicated subforum.
The submission is therefore preserved, and it relies on users for availability of the encode. The status of Playground submissions is above Gruefood, but below Published Movies.