Speedrunning

I’m not exactly sure if this counts as a project, but in 2016, I was interested in speedrunning and decided to run a obscure game from my childhood called Gotcha Force. The game did not have much support from other speedrunners, and the record back then was years old. I then made it my goal to beat this record. This led to me doing a lot of research on the game itself, breaking down which stages in the game to do in what order and what units to use in the game to get through the game as fast as possible. This research on the game led me to find out some new application for a glitch that was used in the world record route that gave me a significant advantage to the old record.

Once I finished routing, I had to actually practice and record runs for submission to the leaderboard. Through many weeks of practice, I was able to cut down my time by several minutes, eventually securing the world record for myself. Eventually, my run was overtaken, but it was very satisfying to create this goal for myself and complete it. It even got several other people to pick up and speedrun this game that I love, so I was very satisfied with this result.

Through this project the thing I learned the most was setting goals for myself. In order for me to have the motivation to accomplish anything I need to be able to set milestone and goals to work towards. One of the most important things that I learned was to also create some smaller goals to achieve in the middle. I broke off certain stages to practice by itself and set a goal to beat that one stage in a certain time frame. It is very important to be able to not only set lofty goals, but also some smaller realistic ones. Another aspect that I learned as well was to ask for help. There were many aspects to the game that I didn’t understand, and through some online forums, I was able to find help and answers. One such person pointed me to the new glitch that I found out which helped me actually secure my final goal (the title picture is of the program that was helpful to me).