Game:

Scrabble (1996)

Duration: 5:11

89 views

2

Credit for this goes almost entirely to the word games speedrunning community. They're the ones who took the initiative to actually figure out what was optimal and build the board. In particular shoutouts to orangetriangle, duustinduude, and 5cr4bb13. Orangetriangle was the one who made the board I used here. The only thing I brought to the table was being the person who already knew how to use TAStudio.

If you'd like to join the Word Games Speedrunning discord, you can do so here: https://discord.gg/tF9epQxCfh

Some notes in no particular order:
(1) The board is not necessarily perfect. There's a lot that goes into optimizing a board, and there are aspects of this one that we could potentially improve on. In particular, the word bonus tiles are slow, and this hits two of them. This is among the best boards we have found, but it's possible we can improve on it.

(2) Tile picking is slow. In theory, we would manipulate RNG to have the game simply give us workable tiles every turn. In the frames before I actually start the run, I go to the settings and turn on manual tile picking. This allows us to select the ideal tiles in an ideal order. Because an ideal TAS wouldn't use manual tile picking, I didn't work particularly hard to optimize those sections. The inputs were all on the first frames they could be, but the routing could definitely be improved.

(3) Despite these limitations, I wanted to put this together anyway, because it really doesn't take very long to do this when you already have the tile layout, and we wanted to be able to get an estimate for a final time on this. With these, we can both give ourselves a standard to try to beat, as well as get more information about frame data in this game.

(4) I was originally going to build another board, but orangetriangle whipped up this one after we saw that I naturally started with "MODEST" in my rack. I was going to exchange tiles first turn, but because this was put together I didn't have to. And that's just neat!

(5) There's a ton that goes into optimizing the board layout, but I'm sure a lot of people are wondering why I was playing 6 letter words instead of 7s. The simple answer is that the community calculated that playing 6 letter words ends up being faster. A "bingo" animation plays when you play all 7 tiles, and that animation makes it slower overall. I won't get into all the other optimization details here, but feel free to ask questions if you have them!

(6) Egg

(7) The final time by RTA timing is about 4m15s. This is about 2 minutes off of the RTA world record by 5crab. However, RTA runs don't do manual tile selection. If we do figure out RNG manipulation, the final time would be much faster. We still need to figure out how much faster.

(8) I did all cursor movement with dpad in this. The game *can* take analog input, but I looked into it for a few minutes and decided not to bother with it for this pass. There is some weird behavior with analog input. You need to hold it for several frames before it starts taking effect, but the number of frames didn't seem consistent? I will look into it next time.

(9) You are cute. Thanks for reading all this.

Other Statistics