Snap run description

Pokemon Snap

Pokemon snap is a different kind of speedrun. The game itself is an autoscroller, but we have a few techniques to maximize our speed and progress through the game. The major techniques include Lag Reduction, Menuing, Point Pressing, Camera Locking

Lag Reduction: The N64 has trouble rendering lots of polygons/animations/particle effects on screen at once, but de-loads/unloads things out of sight of the camera. Because of this trouble, busy sections of the run, like loading big rooms, watching lots of Pokemon, or excess particles can cause the game to lag significantly, which makes the run slower. To combat this, we look at the sky/floor or at something with few polys to help reduce lag when we don't need to look around at anything

Menuing: This one is 2-fold. 1) we only take pictures that we need, meaning that we know the exact pictures that we're submitting to Oak. When we finish a level, we submit the 9 out of 12 pics as fast as we can. which leads to 2) since we know the pattern of pics, we can try to do frame perfect menuing to submit the pictures as fast as possible

Point Pressing: We need to get a lot of points to hit certain milestones in the run. At the highest level, we get 22500 points in beach so that we can take the fastest pic in the next level for 1500 to get 24000 points for apples. at lower skill levels, there are options to allow as low as 17000 points out of beach but sacrifices time in the next level. stuff like this is repeated many times through the run to hit the games progress walls as fast as possible with enough stuff

Camera Locking: while the game IS an autoscroller, we do have some influence on the speed and direction of the cart/player. an easy way to think of it is like: the game moves us forward at a rate of 5 mph, but we also move an additional 3 mph in the direction we look at. in this example, we can move 8 mph if we look forward with the cart, or 2 mph if we look backwards. So with this idea, we should always look forward, right? The problem comes from the fact that we have to look around to get good points. The trick is, when the camera is zoomed in (with the Z button), it maintains your speed and direction.

In short, to ensure we move the fastest through the level, we lock the camera looking forward, then look at the sky/ground for lag reduction, and only look up to take the best possible photos