AGDQ 2024

https://github.com/Zamiell/racing-plus/blob/main/docs/challenges.md#r7-season-2-instant-start

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Intro points
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- The Binding of Isaac is a twin-stick shooter by famous indie developer Edmund McMillen.
- It's the most popular "rogue-like" game. In "rogue-like" games, every time you play, you have to start with a brand new character, but you also get a brand new randomized experience.
- To be clear, the individual enemies and power-ups are all carefully crafted by the designer, but the exact combination of them have never been seen before.
- So that means that speedrunning a rogue-like is different than speedrunning a normal game like Mario or Zelda. Every run is a unique challenge and its up to the runner to find the best way to solve it on the fly.
- Normally, beating the game is not that hard, but doing it as fast as possible is very hard. And today Jack is playing a category called R+7 Season 2, which means that he has to beat the game seven times in a row. And he's going to try to get it done in under an hour.

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Near-beginning points
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- The first character of the run is X, and Jack's first goal will be to get to the second floor boss as soon as possible, because that's where your devil deal, which has a chance to contain the most powerful items in the game.

- As Jack makes his way through the caves, we can talk a little bit about the history of the game. The original version of The Binding of Isaac was made in flash back in 2011. But nowadays, people are probably more familiar with the remake, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, which came out in 2014. Since then, there have been three DLCs released for the game, each making the game more complicated. The last DLC is called Repentance, which came out in 2021, and this is the version that Jack is playing on today.
- And on top of that, Jack is also playing with a racing mod enabled, which provides some nice quality of life features like the timer in the bottom-left corner of the screen. It also takes you to the next character on the speedrun automatically without having to go back to the menu. The racing mod does not add any new content to the game, so everything in this run can be understood by people who have only played the vanilla game.

- So let's talk a little bit about the category. As I said earlier, the goal of the speedrun is to beat the game 7 times with 7 different characters. Each character gets assigned a random powerful starting item at the beginning of the run in order to get the run going,
- How fast Jack will be able to finish all 7 randomly generated runs will a combination of both luck and skill. He might randomly get some good items or some bad items, but on top of that there are adjustements and strategies that he will be doing. For example, if a run is particularly weak, he might go out of his way to get more items from shops and treasure rooms.

- Right now, we are streaming live on Twitch.tv, and there is a very famous emote on Twitch called BibleThump. People usually spam it in the chat when something bad happens on a stream. Fun fact - the emote depicts the protagonist of this game, Isaac.

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Other points
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- In this category, you want to beat each character in around 9 minutes, meaning that if you beat all 7 characters in around an hour, that is considered to be a pretty fast run.

- (Explain the D6.)

- (Explain the compass. Compass trolling.)

- The last time the game was ran at a GDQ was at AGDQ 2020 by StoneAgeMarcus. And that was back before the Repentance DLC was released, so it was essentially an entirely different version of the game. Besides adding a bunch of new items and other content, the biggest change in the DLC was that orbitals were heavily nerfed. In general, I'm a big fan of all the bug fixes and balance tweaks that the developer did, but I feel like the orbital change was one of their only blunders. It's a big shame because you virtually never see offensive orbital use anymore, and this was one of the main ways that speedrunners had historically differentiated themselves from non-competitive players.
- But even though Jack probably won't be using orbitals much, he's still moving his character much differently than in non-competitive play. Every movement is precise and intentioned, and he's going to be doing things like ending every room as close to the exit door as possible.