14-Mar-2014, 1:46 AM
It's been nearly a month since my last entry here, due to a couple things. The first and most obvious from looking around the site is that I released my levelset, Ultimate Chip 2 (those curious can go get it from the downloads section) yesterday night. I've spent a while working on this, so I haven't really been working on optimizing these levels. The less obvious reason is that I was optimizing my entry for this month's Time Trial competition-I can't say what times I got yet, but I can say that I'm satisfied with what I did get and can't see any improvements.
The least obvious reason is that I hit my first really big roadblock bold. No, not Blobnet, I got a 41x and called it a day there. I'll have to return eventually, but I'll cross that bridge when it comes time. No, I hit a huge roadblock on Blink. Teleblock took roughly an hour to get down, mostly because I was trying to teleport in such a way so that I would miss a spring slide. Elementary took 3 tries in comparison, though the long hallways were useful for getting a tapping rhythm down. I also realized that I could always hold for a longer hallway to even out the steps back to the earliest possible timeframe. Nice Day was a bit annoying with the walkers, but nothing too bad. Castle Moat and Tossed Salad were easy, Digger was also fairly easy and quite fun too.
Then came Iceberg, with a shortcut to the exit I never knew about! Naturally I fell victim to the cross checking once, it's practically a rite of passage. Forced Entry took a solid half hour to pull off, but overall the timing wasn't too bad-lots of stretches where you just hold one key and tap a second one between chips. The hardest part was definitely the very end of the level. Blobnet I didn't even try for. Not worth it right now. Oorto Geld took a few tries to get the block cages down, and then I scored 424 twice in a row before realized I needed to take a block into the 7th cage
Blink...I gave it quite a few tries, kept bonking into walls or forgetting the route. Eventually I wrote down notes on when to double teleport and switch 'parity', but these weren't exactly helpful because they were confusing. I realized putting down when chips are collected could help me find my place in the route, and it did. It was enough to score 433. Too many hesitations. At this point I overhauled the notes I'd made to show the direction and chips collected, with brackets to show when I would have to spring slide perpendicular to the emerging direction. My notes looked like this:
V1[V1]V1 VV1
V1 V1 HH1H2
HH1H1 H1 HH1
V1 V1 V1 VV0
H1[H1]H1 H1 H1 H1 HH2
V2 V2 VVVVVX
The only difference was I collected the 2 chips in the lower right ASAP forcing a 3rd perpendicular slide compared to what I ended up getting bold with. However, this scored 434 a few times, at which point I basically said "screw it" and moved on.
This proved wise as Chchchips, Go With the Flow and Ping Pong were all done within 10 minutes. Ping Pong was first try despite losing [4]. This was all done a couple weeks ago, and rather than leave 2 difficult bolds for where I left off, I took a break from going for bold to work on the other aforementioned things.
Today I decided to go back, warmed up with saving the [4] in Ping Pong (one try of course), and spent literally 8 minutes getting Blink. All it took was a step back...well, I wasn't about to stop there, and went straight into Arcticflow. This was a mistake. The first 73 seconds of the 98 second level are trivial. The last 14 are trivial. This leave 11 seconds where everything can and will go wrong...all I can say is I'm sooo glad the exit isn't one step closer to the socket, which WOULD force perfect boosting. I made a copy of the level with Chip starting after the slide and placed an exit where I needed the timer to be a certain value in the level. From there, I practiced the boosting, got it fast enough once and went back to the main level. Failed 3 times, went back to practice. Repeated this cycle a few times, then decided to change it up a bit. I practiced the boosting to the point where I scored a run of the section fast enough 5 times in a row, figuring with that consistency, 302 would be easy. I scored 301.8, twice in a row, then couldn't even do the boosting. I wish I could say I'm surprised by this, but I'm really not with all the speedruns I've done. It took another 20 minutes of grinding to finally go fast enough and score a 302.0. I don't even care about the lost [4], even though I know where most of them are, there's no gain to going for it. I did what I set out to do, and that was score 302 on Arcticflow.
The current count for bolds stands at 26, skipping only Blobnet so far. I wonder if I should stream my attempts at these next bolds, since I already know I'm going to stream Monster Lab...
The least obvious reason is that I hit my first really big roadblock bold. No, not Blobnet, I got a 41x and called it a day there. I'll have to return eventually, but I'll cross that bridge when it comes time. No, I hit a huge roadblock on Blink. Teleblock took roughly an hour to get down, mostly because I was trying to teleport in such a way so that I would miss a spring slide. Elementary took 3 tries in comparison, though the long hallways were useful for getting a tapping rhythm down. I also realized that I could always hold for a longer hallway to even out the steps back to the earliest possible timeframe. Nice Day was a bit annoying with the walkers, but nothing too bad. Castle Moat and Tossed Salad were easy, Digger was also fairly easy and quite fun too.
Then came Iceberg, with a shortcut to the exit I never knew about! Naturally I fell victim to the cross checking once, it's practically a rite of passage. Forced Entry took a solid half hour to pull off, but overall the timing wasn't too bad-lots of stretches where you just hold one key and tap a second one between chips. The hardest part was definitely the very end of the level. Blobnet I didn't even try for. Not worth it right now. Oorto Geld took a few tries to get the block cages down, and then I scored 424 twice in a row before realized I needed to take a block into the 7th cage
Blink...I gave it quite a few tries, kept bonking into walls or forgetting the route. Eventually I wrote down notes on when to double teleport and switch 'parity', but these weren't exactly helpful because they were confusing. I realized putting down when chips are collected could help me find my place in the route, and it did. It was enough to score 433. Too many hesitations. At this point I overhauled the notes I'd made to show the direction and chips collected, with brackets to show when I would have to spring slide perpendicular to the emerging direction. My notes looked like this:
V1[V1]V1 VV1
V1 V1 HH1H2
HH1H1 H1 HH1
V1 V1 V1 VV0
H1[H1]H1 H1 H1 H1 HH2
V2 V2 VVVVVX
The only difference was I collected the 2 chips in the lower right ASAP forcing a 3rd perpendicular slide compared to what I ended up getting bold with. However, this scored 434 a few times, at which point I basically said "screw it" and moved on.
This proved wise as Chchchips, Go With the Flow and Ping Pong were all done within 10 minutes. Ping Pong was first try despite losing [4]. This was all done a couple weeks ago, and rather than leave 2 difficult bolds for where I left off, I took a break from going for bold to work on the other aforementioned things.
Today I decided to go back, warmed up with saving the [4] in Ping Pong (one try of course), and spent literally 8 minutes getting Blink. All it took was a step back...well, I wasn't about to stop there, and went straight into Arcticflow. This was a mistake. The first 73 seconds of the 98 second level are trivial. The last 14 are trivial. This leave 11 seconds where everything can and will go wrong...all I can say is I'm sooo glad the exit isn't one step closer to the socket, which WOULD force perfect boosting. I made a copy of the level with Chip starting after the slide and placed an exit where I needed the timer to be a certain value in the level. From there, I practiced the boosting, got it fast enough once and went back to the main level. Failed 3 times, went back to practice. Repeated this cycle a few times, then decided to change it up a bit. I practiced the boosting to the point where I scored a run of the section fast enough 5 times in a row, figuring with that consistency, 302 would be easy. I scored 301.8, twice in a row, then couldn't even do the boosting. I wish I could say I'm surprised by this, but I'm really not with all the speedruns I've done. It took another 20 minutes of grinding to finally go fast enough and score a 302.0. I don't even care about the lost [4], even though I know where most of them are, there's no gain to going for it. I did what I set out to do, and that was score 302 on Arcticflow.
The current count for bolds stands at 26, skipping only Blobnet so far. I wonder if I should stream my attempts at these next bolds, since I already know I'm going to stream Monster Lab...
My CC1 levelsets: (25, 150, 149, 149, 149, 149, 60, 149, 43, +2 = 1025 total)
25 levels.dat | Ultimate Chip.dat | Ultimate Chip 2.ccl | Ultimate Chip 3.dac | Ultimate Chip 4.zip | Ultimate Chip 5 | Ultimate Chip 6 | Walls of CCLP4 | i^e
IHNN-Ultimate: 147 of my best levels (through UC5), plus 2 entirely new ones. May be overhauled soon.
My CC2 levelsets: (100, ???)
IHNN1 | IHNN2
My CC score tracker. Has lots of cool automated features!
Twitch | Youtube | Twitter
25 levels.dat | Ultimate Chip.dat | Ultimate Chip 2.ccl | Ultimate Chip 3.dac | Ultimate Chip 4.zip | Ultimate Chip 5 | Ultimate Chip 6 | Walls of CCLP4 | i^e
IHNN-Ultimate: 147 of my best levels (through UC5), plus 2 entirely new ones. May be overhauled soon.
My CC2 levelsets: (100, ???)
IHNN1 | IHNN2
My CC score tracker. Has lots of cool automated features!
Twitch | Youtube | Twitter
