SGL Goal Making Instructions

If you have an idea of a game or goal please contact ....


What makes a good SGL goal?

Length -- 3 minutes is ideal (minimum 1.5 minutes, maximum 4 minutes).  Short enough that players can make many attempts within 30 minutes.  Long enough to not get boring for the audience.

Accessibility -- must be learnable within 1 hour for a mystery game, or 1 week for a week-long game.  Even bad players should be able to complete the goal.

Difficulty -- should contain enough high quality gameplay that it is able to distinguish good players from average players.  It can't be too difficult or else players won't finish enough runs to really optimize their work.


Things to remember:

Equipment matters!  The amount of health, weapons, items, powerups, etc that your character starts with is very important.  It is just as important as which stage you're playing.  If you're suggesting a goal such as "Beat stages 3 and 4" please indicate what the character should start with (or send us an actual savestate that has these items).

Savestates should be set about 2 to 3 seconds before input begins.  This gives players time to move their hand back to the controller after pressing reset.  When in doubt set the savestate as early as possible, since we can easily change the state to make it later if needed.

Timing should end upon an easy-to-detect visual cue (i.e. the moment the boss finishes exploding; the moment the screen begins to fade out; the moment "stage clear" appears; etc).  It's preferable that players have at least 1 second between their last meaningful input and when they hit their final split, but this isn't possible for all games.

Other split points (besides the final split) can also be defined for a goal.  Ideally a goal should have 2 or 3 splits, including the final one.  Maximum is 4 splits for NES/SNES, 3 splits for Gameboy.

You can make multiple goals per game.  In fact it's good to have several (for example two week-long goals and one or more mystery goals).  Mystery goals should be easy to learn within 1 hour of practice -- some games require complex routing or are too difficult to learn within 1 hour.  For these games it's better to use them only as week-long goals (i.e. for matches that have a 1-week practice period).  Please specify if you think the goal is learnable within 1 hour or if it should only be used as a week-long goal.


What to avoid:

Autoscrollers.  Stuff that's almost like an autoscroller.  Cutscenes.  Text mashing.

Long hallways with nothing in them.  Sections of gameplay that require no skill.

Heavily RNG-dependent sections or bosses.  A small amount RNG is ok, but cut out the parts that rely too much on RNG.  Especially if they come at the end of the goal (RNG at the the beginning of the goal isn't as bad).

Sections that require excessive amounts of memorization to get through.  A little memorization is to be expected, but don't go overboard, especially with a mystery goal.


Tips:

Use FCEUX 2.2.0 for NES, Snes9x 1.5.1-RR-v7 for SNES, or Bizhawk (current release) for Gameboy.

You can use either the U or J version of the ROM.  U is preferred, but sometimes J is more convenient.  Please look for a ROM that is properly named according to canonical naming conventions (ends with "(U)" or "(J)", and usually "[!]").  If your ROMs don't follow standard naming conventions you should probably find a romset or website that does.  There's a lot of bad ROM dumps and alternative versions floating around out there, and you don't know what you're getting if the file doesn't have a full canonical name.

Sometimes the easiest way to make a savestate is to play back the TAS until you reach the level you want, pause the emulator, stop playback, and then create your savestate.  Note that you should always stop the movie before creating a savestate or else all the movie-playback data will be embedded into that savestate, making it a much larger file.  Also be careful that your character's starting health, equipment, etc are all reasonable.  TASes will often skip items and upgrades, leaving the character vulnerable and under-powered.

Some games have a password system or level-select code that you can use to reach a level quickly.  If you make a savestate starting from a code make sure your character's starting equipment is still reasonable.  Some codes will start you with less stuff than what you'd normally have at that level, so be careful.

Goals don't always have to start at the beginning of a level.  Goals don't have to stop at the end of a level, or after a boss.  Feel free to set the start and end points wherever will give us a goal of the appropriate length that contains the highest density of quality gameplay with the least down-time or RNG.