Hi, I was thinking of maybe trying to run this game and was wondering if anyone was interested in co-op? It's pretty weird and full of swearing but a lot of fun.
Here's the Knowledge Base page I started and will resume work on later. If you'd like, you can adopt any of the terminology though there wasn't a lot of discussion surrounding it, mostly I came up with it by myself and some of it is from the manuals. Otherwise it has a few links that could be interesting even if it's for a different game in the series. https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/The_Typing_of_the_Dead
I won't be getting into this one myself until the old one is through with.
Overkill is rather different. There are no multiple routes and pretty much the only thing that really influences the speed of the run is how fast you type and maaaaybe whether or not you save survivors. It's on rails of course, but the rails stop when there are zombies on screen as evidenced by this:
These are a result of some timing and a little napkin math to work out which civilians to save or let die and surprisingly often it works out faster to save the civilian since waiting for them to die takes so long.
These are a result of some timing and a little napkin math to work out which civilians to save or let die and surprisingly often it works out faster to save the civilian since waiting for them to die takes so long.
Nice. I'm working on my resubmission as an IL table and I appreciate the routing assistance. Your remarks on Papa's Palace of Pain seemed to be spot on with my testing, although I think the second group of zombies might be a hair faster than the third.
I'm hoping that within a couple of weeks I will get this finished off and then we can have some fun competing over the ILs.
By the way, it looks like there is some variability to whether or not one should be saving certain survivors just because a lot of the calculations are a near thing.
Just as an example, the same situation could have multiple scenarios:
-Mutant takes 4 seconds to walk forward and kill survivor. (let's say you pre-type everything but the last character and can pop the head off the same frame the survivor dies): 4 seconds total -Mutant spawns with the word "ham" - killed almost instantly and triggers a 2 second "thanks for saving me" cutscene.: 2 seconds total -Mutant spawns with the phrase "eldritch longsword" - we'll say takes 3 seconds to type out. At this point... saving survivor is 5 seconds, killing survivor is 4.
The question then becomes, and only at the moment you are about to finish the mutant: is the cutscene that I'm about to trigger longer or shorter than the amount of time it would take to wait the rest of the travel distance between the mutant and survivor? And this can change depending on the RNG of the mutant's phrase.
Making a post about boss cycles. I'll edit this later:
Jasper - Papa's Palace of Pain Definitely time save possible here and short circuiting the first cycle. Best I've ever seen here is 16 "yellow" phrases, including the mind-touching one (done by me) 4 "grey" phrases, (done by SuccinctAndPunchy)
If you get both 16 and 4, as above, it's possible to majorly save time by having the boss only go into the last couple of short-word corners. I think that some kind of demon nightmare person might be able to do 17 and 4, and I can only imagine that it would save yet another 8 second boss animation.
Coco & Sindy - Naked Terror This boss has random animations that can severely waste time. Sindy has the potential to do various gross things, the worst of which seems to be applying "makeup" and otherwise touching herself in unappealing ways. What happens here is that Sindy will always finish these animations, even if Coco's word has already been typed. If you're lucky, Sindy will be idle when Coco returns to behind her and is ready to re-launch. If you're unlucky, Sindy will start a lengthy animation right before Coco would have come out for the next word... and you're stuck there staring at her grotesque form with nothing to type.
I think if MyOhMyke has proven that you can slam both of these figures out in the same run and further reduce the first cycle time significantly. Approximately ~15 seconds to save here by not letting him get to the "Junk tornado" attack pattern and turn even less corners.
Screamer - Ballistic Trauma
As far as I can tell, no RNG or cycle skips here at all.
Carny - Nigil & Sebastian
There are a few time saves here. You definitely want to kill him before he goes through the lengthier parts of his second cycle. The full cycle is as follows Three Backups-->X Grey Words-->Clown Rush-->Clowns Behind-->The Dive-->Grey Words. You want to kill him during the second run through X grey words, or failing that, the second Clown Rush. Once you have to sit through a second Clowns Behind and Dive... you've lost a lot of time.
Creeping Flesh - Meat Katie
It now appears to be possible to entirely skip the Charge attack if you manage to get 3 x 4 (12) grey words on her during the initial part of her attack pattern. If you get any less than 12, she will charge and you will lose time dealing with that pattern.
Crawler - Scream Train
No RNG or cycles to skip that I know of.
Lobber - The Fetid Waters
You can seriously reduce the amount of time you spend fighting this boss. There is a theoretical additional skip that nobody has ever achieved here as well. The number of grey words that you get after stopping his attacks can change the number of lengthy lob / puke cycles that he executes. On Motherfucker it's difficult but possible to get two grey words enough times that there are only two lob / puke cycles. In theory, if you could get three grey words twice on Bitch difficulty, you could get this number down to one lob/ puke cycle.
Brutus - Jailhouse Judgment
Brutus is still a bit of a mystery due to the sporadic "there he goes" pattern that does not always happen, even if you consistently get damage in on him. However, it is important to get all of your grey words to kill him before he starts "charging".
Mother - Overkill
Mash mash mash mash mash. Mostly you mash as fast as you can. Some words trigger special bonus damage (but also may cause slow-motion?), but nobody has had enormous success with implementing these during the boss fight. There is also a 10 seconds "instruction skip" that can save 10 seconds of RTA, and does count on the speedrun.com leaderboard... but I don't believe the SDA timing includes this gameplay.