¿Te he contado, alguna vez, cuál es la definición de locura? La locura… es… es hacer exactamente la misma mierda una y otra vez. Y esperar que algo cambie. – Vaas in the Spanish version of Far Cry 3

This explains me perfectly this week.

To give a bit of background, I have somewhat decided that I want Tomb Raider to be one of my things that I’m known for livestreaming-wise. Though I’ll never get to recapture that magic of when I first played it blind, it’s a game that I’m finding enjoyment in playing again and again (I’m about to finish my sixth total playthrough I believe).

Well, to give further background, I had a crazy fun stream sometime last week where I decided to do a full runthrough of TR on easy in one sitting. It still stands out as a massive highlight in my livestreaming “career” so far. I met a whole bunch of people, chatted somewhat in my broken Spanish and French, and just had tons of fun in general.

Well, for me, there’s a certain energy to a run (even though I think mine ended up taking like 4 or 5 hours) that just can’t be captured when trying to break the game up into chunks over the course of several days.

There’s also the simple fact that I look at livestreaming as this snowball effect. There’s the snowball that you build over time by streaming again and again and building up an audience. But I feel there’s a second snowball that you’re building every single stream. I feel this is even more so true for those of us who are just starting up and have zero people following us.

Basically, my premise is this: you start your stream for the day. Hopefully, you get a random viewer or two, and hopefully, they actually stick around. Well, basically, for each viewer you get that sticks around, they boost up your viewer count which makes you even more likely to have more “drive-bys” from other people. And if they stick around, you boost your viewer count even more, thus reinforcing the cycle.

So for your entire session, you’re building your snowball. And if you’re streaming something somewhat niche, you might even end up as the #1 streamer for that moment.

But here’s the problem of course. When you stop streaming, the snowball is obliterated.

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I know there are a whole bunch of people I unofficially follow on Twitch, but tonight was the first time I actually followed someone officially (shoutout to brsmstr who improved upon his Tomb Raider console world record tonight).

And surely, there are others like me. Others who may stick around in someone’s stream for hours and yet never officially participate or follow. Well, the problem with people like me, is if you (the streamer) are buried towards the bottoms of the listings (I generally am browsing by game), I’m never going to see you again.

So how does that relate to all of this? I feel like the perfect way to build that one-session-only snowball is to be able to run the game from start to finish. It gives things a clearly defined goal. You don’t just faff about; you know your purpose. Something like that.

So to actually move on to the real point. I think I’m going to do Tomb Raider speedrunning.

To immediately qualify that, I have zero intention of ever going for a world record. I just don’t have the muscle memory, twitchiness to pull that off.

To give an example, I have played hours and hours and still more hours of Uncharted 3 coop, yet I still fail things like crushing unless I’m paired with people who are really good. I can memorize sequences and such, such that I’ll know when and where enemies will appear, but that doesn’t aid me in actually positioning the controller to get the headshot.

So for me, it’s more so for two reasons:

  1. if I casually speedrun, then I’ll have a decent idea of “do I have time to start and complete a Tomb Raider stream right now?” When I did my run on easy, I had zero idea how long it would take, but now I know that I could probably get one done in 4 or 5 hours. And of course, the shorter I can make my times, the more likely I am to be able to find some time to fit a run into my schedule.
  2. I’m having fun glitching out.

Let’s talk about 2.

If you had asked me a week ago if I thought it was possible that I would spend, oh, I don’t know 4 or 5 hours (could even be 10, haven’t counted yet) on a single trick, I would’ve never thought that was something I would do.

I’ve always wondered, who are these people who find these glitches? I tend to think that the camps of people figuring out new and exciting ways to break a game are not necessarily the people who go on to perfect those methods and make world record speedruns. In fact, I often wonder how often the glitch-finders actually speed run.

As part of my entertain-myself-later, I’ve been livestreaming my repeated attempts to get glitches. Generally, it’s full of fail. But I do it because, hey, I personally would be interested in seeing how tedious/frustrating it is to actually figure out how to break the game. And second, I was wanting to get video footage of what I was trying and how it was working.

I continue to learn that Twitch is inappropriate for this.

  1. my livestream glitches in the worst of places. For instance, in trying to troll through my own footage just now, I found that one of my super early moments of getting the glitch was cut short by twitch. I was down on the ground and suddenly I’m magically in the side of the mountain. Basically, either due to twitch’s continued problems, or my sucky internet, I completely lost the step where I actually, erm, “activated” the glitch.

  2. you can’t pause/rewind/highly analyze the livestream.

So instead, what I’ve taken to doing is using the elgato capture card that I bought once upon a time (back when I thought I’d be brave enough to upload let’s plays to youtube).

Basically, my current method is:

  1. start elgato recording
  2. keep working on the glitch until I get it
  3. finish the recording and do frame-by-frames to see if I can learn anything

So what have I learned? Nothing.

Well, I think I finally have it as of my latest practice session, but basically, up from the first time I managed to get the glitch: http://www.twitch.tv/hayleytormenta/c/4801945 to earlier today, I had learned nothing.

My current theory, with this specific glitch, is it’s some combination of pre-aiming and proper directional control with the left thumbstick.

I tend to think that the PC would be far less maddening. The 360 degree pointable thumbstick on the PS4 makes it far too easy to make movements that you’re not even aware you’re making. So while I’d be walking myself into the same exact corner near the wall, and aiming at the same exact spot on the wall, apparently I’d be handling the left thumbstick a little bit differently when I’d actually attempt the jump.

Somewhere tonight though, (oh please please please be true) I may have finally found a method that works somewhat consistently for me.

The maddening thing was that, even once I discovered it, I knew I was doing something funky with my left hand, so I’d freak out everytime I didn’t get the trick, thinking that the muscle memory was lost for good. Ya know, considering I had never actually figured out what I was actually doing with my left hand.

And the biggest thing I think I’ve learned from this experience is that game footage is not enough. I have no idea how complex it would be to setup, but I would love to figure out how to get a camera feed of my hands so I could go frame by frame and try to see if I could figure out what I was actually doing.

Frankly, I wish more speedrunners did this. TheArtisticBallistic did something like this in his explanatory TR run where he had visualizations of the keys pressed, but I would still like to see some actual hands.

I tried getting a camera setup, but the footage hasn’t seemed terribly useful yet (erm, especially given that it isn’t synced to my actual game footage).

For me, what seems to have worked (assuming I can recreate it the next time I play), was to get myself into a corner, aim at a specific spot, and start moving the controller in a certain direction. Then, I make the jump.

This was basically my exact same strategy before, but I never managed to make it consistent.

I think somewhere around the point that I learned that I wasn’t aiming in the same place as the explanatory PC speedrun, I started wondering just where all I could aim. I basically learned that I could aim practically anywhere and still get the glitch. Just not consistently.

Bizarrely, it also often seemed to work out that I’d get the glitch by aiming at a completely different spot. Meaning, the only way to consistently get the glitch was to just pick new random aim spots every single time.

Miraculously, I managed to find a random aim point that I managed to make far more consistent than anything I had ever tried before. Or maybe it was the fact that this was around the same time that I started aiming with the pistol instead of the bow. I have no idea. What kills me is that this is supposedly an “easy” trick. Yeah, tell that to my 7 lost hours.

Good god, I hope I can recreate it the next time I try, because I basically can’t take more of this dissapointment of literally hour after hour on this one specific trick, without having learned anything.

Like on this last session, I was just dying to have a eureka moment. A moment that made all the rest of it worth it. And let’s see… fingers crossed, knock on wood, whatever else… well, hopefully I’ve got it now.

So starting next week, I’m going to start casually speedrunning Tomb Raider. And by casually, I do mean casually. Ya know, like forget-to-skip-a-cutscene level of casual.

I’m planning on adding new glitches to my arsenal too. Hopefully, nothing else will produce as many WTF moments as this one has.

I have my doubts.