[TAS] Dharma Doujou Arcade in 21:53 (361,060 points)

Channel:

Prog61

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10,200

Published on September 13, 2022 3:09:51 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MrM1SuK_AU

Game:

Counter-Strike: Source (2004)

Duration: 23:34

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40

This video has been obsoleted by : https://youtu.be/iXweyxgV4Ek
Tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) of Dharma Doujou Arcade in 21:53 (361,060 points)

Time starts when you select "1P Only" (0:26), and ends on fadeout of the final stage. (22:19)

Dharma Doujou is one of the best puzzle games I've ever played. It really is a fun brain teaser.

You have the choice to play with a boy or a girl.
If you start the game by pressing the 'Player 1' button, you play with the boy, if you press the 'Player 2' button you play with the girl (but you have to play with the player 2 controls).

After each stage you get a 'Time' and a 'Miss' bonus.
The 'Time' bonus starts at 12800 and decreases proportionally to the height of the critter that is on the left of the screen.
But you can slow it down by making matches. Depending on the symbol you are matching, some matches are more effective than others.
The 'Miss' bonus starts at 3000 points and you lose 100 points for each 'Miss'.

The layout of the blocks for a level is not random. There is a fixed number of layouts available for each stage. (from 3 to 8 layouts for each stage)
I took a screenshot of every layout I found, you can see them here: https://vgmaps.com/Atlas/Arcade/index.htm#DharmaDoujou
I found 87 different layouts. I may be missing one (or two) layouts because my method of listing them depends on the rng. If you find a layout that is not in my list, please tell me.
The layout presented to the player is randomized from the available layouts for the stage.
In the TAS I manipulated the rng to get the layout for which I had the best pattern to beat it with as few 'Miss' as possible. To do this, I simply inserted empty frames before the last move of the previous stage until I got what I wanted. The delay is most noticeable at the end of stage 3. (2:32)

To do a stage , I had to figure out what the best moves are to complete the stage as quickly as possible.
To help me with this task, I developed a small Windows application that allows me to play any layout of any stage much faster than I could in game.
With this, I was able to try many strategies and optimize moves to minimize misses and minimize character movement.
Then I modified my application so that it can play randomly alone except when a match can be made.
It worked well until about stage 12, when my simulator was wasting most of its time doing "Game over" games due to lack of space to move blocks around. So I modified it so that it can't lose by always playing all the blocks in the top row.
This application simulates a few million games per minute. Eventually it produced some interesting patterns that I manually optimized. You can see the result of this in the TAS. But I'm sure it could be optimized more but I think the result is not too bad.


Thanks to Lizstar for showing this game on her Twitch channel and playing Flame Fatales 2022 on GDQ https://youtu.be/NGj7X-C2jDA
If you watch her video, you might find that I couldn't find a better start than her for level 16. The first 6 lines are identical in my TAS.
I have to improve my gameplay if I want to approach Lizstar :) Right now I'm not fast enough to play in real time past stage 7 :).


What is a TAS? https://www.youtube.com/c/Prog61/about
For a good introduction to TASing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ietk1-Wb7oY
For more information visit https://tasvideos.org.

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