[TAS] Head On Arcade 101,980 pts
86Tool-assisted superplay (TAS) of Head On Arcade 101,980 pts
-Goal: Reach 100,000 points
-The only control you have in this game is a 4-way joystick to change lanes where there are gaps in the lanes.
-And you have a button to go fast.
-You can cross 2 lanes when you go slow but only one when you go fast.
-The goal of the game is to eat all the dots while avoiding enemy cars.
-In this text, I give a number to the lanes starting with the outside one, from 1 to 5.
-There are 4 places where cars can change lanes: top , left, right and bottom
-A segment is a quarter loop, there are 4 X 5 = 20 segments
-There are 11+9+7+5+3 = 35 X 4 = 140 dots to eat to finish a level.
-The big red dots are randomly generated by an enemy car. They only exist for a limited time (1:37). They give 5 times the score of normal dots.
-At the end of each level, you get a bonus that consists of 20 times a value that depends on the level you are in
-Enemy cars start off slow.
-When the player has completed about 6 segments, they get a bit faster.
-Towards the end of a level, depending on the level (see below), they go as fast as you with the turbo.
-The game consist of 8 waves that loop infinitely
1- 1 car, speed up when 1 segment remain, 5 pts per dots, 25 per red dots, 15 pts bonus = 300
2- 1 car, speed up when 5 segment remain, 5 pts per dots, 25 per red dots, 20 pts bonus = 400
3- 2 cars, speed up when 1 segments remain, 10 pts per dots, 50 per red dots, 30 pts bonus = 600
4- 2 cars, speed up when 5 segments remain, 10 pts per dots, 50 per red dots, 40 pts bonus = 800
5- 3 cars, speed up when 1 segment remain, 15 pts per dots, 75 per red dots, 50 pts bonus = 1000
6- 3 cars, speed up when 5 segments remain, 15 pts per dots, 75 per red dots, 60 pts bonus = 1200
7- 3 cars, speed up when 9 segments remain, 20 pts per dots, 100 per red dots, 70 pts bonus = 1400
8- 3 cars, speed up when 9 segments remain, 20 pts per dots, 100 per red dots, 70 pts bonus = 1400
-Sometimes enemy cars seem unable to change lanes under certain conditions
-After experimenting, it seems to be a feature that is different for each level.
-In level 1, it seems that if you are on lane 2 and the enemy car is on lane 1, the enemy car cannot change from lane 1 to lane 2 in the bottom gap.
-This does not work if you are on any other lane or for the other gaps.
-There also seems to be something with lane 5.
-In level 1, enemy car on lane 5, player on lane 4, enemy car seem to not be able to change lanes from 5 to 4 on the upper gap (0:21) and after experimenting, the left gap does not seem to work for the enemy car either.
-In level 3, it seems that the bottom gap are not usable by an enemy car if it is on lane 2 and the player is on lane 3 (1:40)
-Here are some other examples I saw in my video: 1:33 top gap, 20:44 right gap.
-This should be investigated further to be able to use it in real games
-Very rarely will an enemy car cross 2 lanes (1:53) because shortly after starting, they are going too fast to do that.
-Small bugs:
-The first red dot eaten seems to only give the points of a normal dot.
-At 4:07 the red car at the bottom ate a dot☹ ️ (at 21:55 too)
-At 10:25 a new dot appears from a red car. (Is it the one that was stolen earlier 😀 )
-It is possible to pass through an enemy car without the game detecting a collision (2:06, 3:58, 4:07...)
-I think we have the same collision detection technique here as in Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man, namely that collisions are detected on pixel blocks. So if you move out of your square to go to an enemy car's square and he moves out of his square and into yours at the same time, you never occupied the same square.
For a full technical explanation, you can read thishttps://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/passing-through-ghosts-in-pac-man..
-So I wouldn't try to do this in a real game because the trick is frame perfect.
-This is a really hard game. When creating this TAS, I had a hard time finishing some levels when all 3 cars are at full speed.
-As far as I know, the behavior of enemy cars is not random. If that's the case, it should be possible to develop patterns like in Pac-Man.
-Ideally, a pattern that groups at least 2 cars out of the 3 would be ideal. Like at 10:10 where the TAS groups all 3 cars, it was not planned but a stroke of luck that I exploited at the end of the level. I could not reproduce this as well as this time for other levels. I should work on that.
-The strategy of this TAS is often to lure enemy cars to change (or keep) a certain lane. Often, this involves pretending to change lanes or to keep a lane longer by slowing down before a gap.
-Note that since the TAS do frame perfect moves, it would be very difficult to try to duplicate what you see here in a real game.
What is a TAS
For more information visihttps://tasvideos.org/rg.
0:00 Loop 1
5:14 Loop 2
10:40 Loop 3
16:27 Loop 4
22:22 Loop 5