So it’s week 2. Of heavy speedrunning practice.

And I sometimes wonder if I’m doing the right thing by streaming this stuff.

First, my main goal was simply to produce something that I would’ve liked to see from others. Like, how long does it take the average person to get the Shantytown skywalking skip? Where do they falter? Do they quickly go from getting it the first time to getting it consistent? Or is the journey from first success to consistent success a long one?

So there’s that.

But I have to admit that there’s other motivation. Really, there’s the fact that if I weren’t streaming my speedrunning practice, I would barely be streaming at all. I want to stay active with streaming and I want people to know that I’m actively working on learning the speedrun. I want to build an audience so that there will hopefully be someone watching during those times when I do something where I don’t look like an asshat.

But there’s a big downside and frankly, I think I like it most when the stream is viewer-free.

In some ways, if Twitch would just allow private streams, my problems would all be solved. See, then I get the best of both worlds: I get to keep a record of my practice session and give people something to watch as a past broadcast if they so choose, but I get the upside of having the live stream itself be totally private.

But that’s not currently a possibility, so I’m stuck with either streaming my horrible, miserable attempts at learning some of these speedrunning tricks, or just not streaming at all.

I can sum it up thusly:

I really do love that people have been trying to help out when I’m trying to learn new tricks. But at the same time, with people watching/trying to help, I feel this massive pressure to get the trick that much sooner.

From what I hear, it seems that I take about three thousand times longer than anyone else to learn these tricks. Frankly, it’s embarrassing.

The embarrassing part isn’t so much that I’m so much slower than everyone else, it’s more so the fact that so much of my practice session seems to be centered around making the same exact mistakes again and again.

And right there would be another reason not to stream. If I weren’t streaming, it would be far easier to just stop/start local OBS recordings so that I could start recording when I’m about to start a trick and then stop once I fail (more likely) or succeed (keep dreaming). Then, I can immediately play it back to see if I can figure out what I did right/wrong.

As of tonight’s stream, I did start experimenting with using OBS in multi mode so that I can easily stop/start individual recordings, but it just doesn’t feel as easy. Plus, I’m running into that old problem of forgetting to actually start the recording. Oops.

the skywalking hell I’m in

I’m finding this second skywalking trick to be a massive headache. Watching Artistic Ballistic’s video, I got the completely wrong impression that this would be easy.

Here’s why I thought that.

In the video, he completely stops several times while doing the skywalking and Lara doesn’t immediately fall to her death. In fact, she doesn’t fall at all. So here I was thinking easy peasy, there won’t be a rush, I can stop whenever I want and really think things through. Now, compare that to the Shantytown waterfall skywalking skip, where basically, once you commit, you better follow through, lest you stop moving and immediately fall to your death.

But it turns out, I was very very wrong.

My memory of the video at the moment, is that Artistic just kinda glosses over just how difficult it is to get the trick started. Until you figure it out, you have about a 100% chance of falling immediately to your death.

Granted, once you unlock the magic key combination and figure out how to get the trick started, it does actually seem true that you can somewhat pause and just hang out without Lara immediately plummeting to her death.

But how do you get it started? Well, it appears to be a magical sequence of keypresses.

Now here’s where my personal problem lies. Frankly, I don’t really seem to be able to do any key combinations properly.

I mean, hell, let’s look at last night’s practice where I learned how to do the hosue skip.

First, if you’re not familiar, basically, there’s a long jump (apparently only possible on PC) that involves scrambling off a ledge and immediately jumping before Lara’s aware of the fact that there’s no longer any solid ground underneath her (basically, in mid-scramble, the game seems to ignore whether the floor exists). Do it right and you get to avoid this entire burning house section. It probably saves like 30 seconds, but for me in my first speedrun, it would’ve saved the 5 minutes of combat where I kept getting murdered in the house (and again, I get to cry “this never happened in practice!”).

So I eventually realized that there was a better ledge on which to practice the jump. Basically because it was quicker to immediately try again. So I figured out the jump there on that ledge. And I could get it several times in a row. Then I’d try it on the real ledge and Lara wouldn’t even jump.

I haven’t reviewed the footage, so I’m not sure what my problem was (probably timing, but who knows), but bizarrely, I found that I could do it almost flawlessly if I’d just close my eyes. This led to a whole bunch of tries in a row, where I’d line myself up, get to where I thought I should be able to make the jump, aim appropriately, then close my eyes and do the appropriate key combinations. Voilà, I’d make the jump.

Then I’d open my eyes to try it. And fail.

I luckily was finally able to get to a point where I could do the trick with my eyes open, but the whole thing was still a major WTF moment for me.

And how that all relates back to this skywalking trick is that, the huge difference between that trick and this, is that for the house skip, I knew what the appropriate key sequence was. On the better ledge, it didn’t take long to figure out the key sequence and timing so that I could practice it ad nauseum.

But for this skywalking trick, I’ve been told that it’s some combination of back, back, right, and then left and forward simultaneously but I don’t know that.

There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

Simply, this quote works because, without having successfully completed the trick on my own, I can’t know the timing.

Frankly, I’m thinking I might just look into macro software and see if that would work with Tomb Raider. What I’d like to do is program a macro to simulate the whole key sequence that you’re supposed to execute to get her skywalking. Then instead, I could focus on things like where I need to land before I actually start that sequence. And then I could play around with timings. How quickly does the key sequence need to be executed? How important are simultaneous keypresses?

So maybe, just maybe, that’s what I’ll work on tomorrow.

things I wish I would’ve thought of sooner

A huge part of the frustration with this particular skywalking trick (well, it’s true of the last one too actually) is just how much set up time there is. I didn’t time it, but let’s say it feels like it takes you a minute just to get to the freaking part where you’re probably going to die within the next 4 seconds (if you’re me). That’s a huge discrepancy between time spent setting up the trick, and time spent actually trying it.

So first, there’s a far better checkpoint to use: when you first get to the beach go immediately for the skywalking trick.

Don’t walk down to near the campfire (it will be a new checkpoint), don’t go after that one hanging thing (since I don’t play the English version I have no idea what it’s called) after which Jonah will give you a new bow.

Just don’t.

No, the second you’re near that area where you can try for the jump. Just flipping try it.

Again, I didn’t time it, but instead of something that feels like a minute’s worth of travel, you’ll instead have about maybe 5-10 seconds of setup before you get to where you need to be.

I so so wish I had remembered about that checkpoint when I was actually streaming. It would’ve saved boatloads of time (no telling if I would’ve actually gotten the trick though).

In a real run, you don’t want to immediately go for the research base skip because you need that upgraded bow that Jonah gives you in order to finish the game.

But in practice? Oy, I still feel like an idiot, because I’m pretty sure I even reloaded at one point from that checkpoint and didn’t realize the significance of where I was standing. Of course, at that point, I think I may have only put in 10 minutes of practice. Not three hours. So I was just concentrating on doing things in the proper order at that point.

So there would be my lesson #1.

Lesson #2 is that I’m wondering if the new OOB skip found on the way to the radio tower would be a better place to learn skywalking.

If you’re not familiar, you emerge from that building that has the fichue’d console, Lara remarks on the unnatural snow, walks across a dangerously narrow ledge, almost gets thrown off the bridge by some rude dude, and then you go for the OOB (out of bounds) trick where you climb up a snowy embankment.

That was the old way anyway.

The new way is to jump out of bounds right before the narrow ledge, and basically get it so that you walk across the bridge on top of said bridge. This completely avoids triggering the quicktime event and also appears to make it much quicker to get OOB.

Why I think this might be a better spot for skywalking.

If I’m not mistaken (I played with it for a few minutes off stream), this area seems to only require jumping out of bounds and striking the magic key sequence to get things started. This is opposed to the research base skywalking skip that seems to require a much more carefully executed setup before you can even try the magic key sequence.

Some of this almost makes me want to find all the places that you can skywalk in the game so that I can just get a feel for skywalking in general.

The huge problem with the Shantyville skip is that, though you do skywalk, you don’t have to really learn how. For one, if you do things right, you’re just holding forward and the left the entire time; you’re not really learning how different direction keys affect things.

Second is the fact that you magically start in a position where you’re already skywalking and won’t suddenly fall to your death. And, if you’re me, you’ve even figured out a starting position where you don’t need to do that magic spin to get her started up the side of the mountain; you literally just hold forward and left the whole time (however, my method is slightly slower, so if you’re wanting a WR you’ll probably want to master the spin).

can I get some progress please?

Oy, I don’t remember day 1 of Shantyville being this horrible. By comparison, tonight’s practice session would’ve been like if I had spent 3 hours trying to get out of bounds only to be murdered almost immediately after trying (luckily, getting OOB won’t kill you in Shantytown - also I realized I called it Shantyville again just now and I refuse to correct it. It’s a portmanteau of Shantytown and Bidonville. Blame the fact that I play the game in French).

But I do remember that a horrible part of the practicing of Shantytown was the fact that it was taking sometimes upwards of like 10 minutes to simply get out of bounds. It’s horribly demotivating to spend a large portion of your time failing on the part of the trick that isn’t even tricky.

And the other horrible part is that there does appear to be this eureka moment of sorts when you finally get some part of the trick. But up to that, it’s just this long slow crawl where there’s basically zero visible progress.

Basically, I feel like the only thing I learned tonight was that I should’ve been using a different checkpoint as my starting point for learning the trick and/or just practicing in the OOB area near the radio tower.

3 hours to learn something that future me could’ve conveyed to past me in a text message.

A text message. From the future. Oooh, spooky music.