This game is a very cool idea. I've done a lot of TASing in the game Remnants of Naezith (where I'm also the #1 player) so I've got experience in this kinda thing(The fruits of my and JSL's labor). I played it a bit and have some issues that I wanted to point out (this will be long winded, sorry!):
First, there seems to be a lot of trial and error involved just to get waits perfect, especially on 1000 tickrate. This is fine in principle, but the game gives no tools to optimize this process which makes it very tedious.
Some of the things that the Naezith TAS tool has that I'm missing in this game are:
- Being able to start the playback paused instantly allowing tick advance instead of having to timescale 0.01 and pause manually.
- Not having to (manually) reset playback to make a change to the code, or to immediately jump to the tick an instruction gets executed.
- With the above, being able to immediately place an action at the current playback tick (in this game, it'd be automatically adding a wait that waits until the current playback tick).
- Unless I'm missing yet another hidden feature (That's another issue I have), having waits that wait until an absolute time value would be very useful.
There's also some other things that would be very useful for optimization, for example:
- Individual X and Y speed values instead of one velocity value. Similarly, delta X and delta Y values would be helpful, though maybe a little excessive.
- An indicator showing where the hook will go if fired on this tick would really help fix some annoying trial-and-error as well.
Finally, some other things that bothered me about the gameplay itself:
- The hitboxes are not great. Whenever I'm trying to cut a corner really close the visible player hitbox goes through the wall hitbox.
- IN MY OPINION: the meta of constantly doing tiny down hooks on the ground to gain as much speed as possible is annoying to optimize and honestly not very interesting to me.
Doing hooks when trying to go fast in this game is usually a bad idea. They tend to slow you down. This feeds into the meta: the fact that hooking is usually a bad idea if you want to keep speed really limits the possibilities and makes the meta of just doing tiny ground hooks even more prevalent.
Because hooks are so punishing, it also seems to usually be better to hook as small as possible to get around corners. - If you move the character such that the line of the hook ends up intersecting a wall before it lands somewhere behind, the hook instantly grabs onto the wall the line intersected even though the head was already way past it. I don't know if this is a bug or intentional behavior. (Check my time score on level 2 to see this in action, at the end)
- I find it frustrating to have to wait out the slow animation before the portal opens. Once the final orb is collected, why doesn't the portal just work immediately?
In conclusion, I want to like this game and I want to like trying to optimize in this game, given that I have enjoyed putting over a thousand hours into just TASing Naezith.
However, I found it to be very tedious to program, and found the optimal mechanics honestly uninteresting. You just end up ground hooking to go fast and doing tiny hooks to get around corners. Especially given it's the main mechanic of the game, hooking is way too punishing.