Mickey's Magical Quest

Hi everyone! Thank you so much for checking in to see what’s new! It’s great to see you.

My last blog post was October 6. The very next day, my next speedrun project started. Yesterday, the project ended with a terrific run that I couldn’t be prouder of. All in all the project ran from 10/7 - 11/11. Let me tell you all about the Mickey era.

The TLDR

I am finishing this grind in second place - here’s the run:

And here’s the leaderboards:

Now let’s get into the details of how it all went down!

Phase 0: GAME SELECTION

Run Characteristics

The project before this one was Zombies Ate My Neighbors 100%. The completed run was 1 hour 14 minutes. It was long. It was random. I attempted 53 unsuccessful 100% runs before the magical run that marked the completion of that project.

Mickey’s Magical Quest is short. The world record is 15 minutes 25 seconds. Mickey’s Magical Quest also has limited randomness, and it’s all at the beginning of the run. Mickey is also a very completable run. Each death you simply start back at the beginning of the level you’re on. You never move backwards. It doesn’t take 53 high focus attempts to beat the game once.

The two games are also different genres - a top-down game versus a sidescrolling platformer. All of these bits of variety contributed to picking Mickey as the next project.

Also, just for context, this is the first game of a trilogy. Will I speedrun the other entries someday? I would say probably to #2 and maybe to #3. Here’s a picture of my three SNES carts:

Community Characteristics

Zombies Ate My Neighbors marked a huge improvement in community over Ninja Turtles, which was the project before Zombies. One of the biggest contributors of the improvement was that the world record holder in Zombies is friendly and helpful.

I keep this in mind as I poke around looking for a new game. The world record holder in this Mickey game is named Le_Hulk on Twitch, and it is his live notifications that I have been most excited for lately. Hulk is extremely friendly, welcoming, and as helpful as possible during my month+ deep-diving of Mickey. I would go as far to say that I am more interested in running other games Hulk has the world record in all else being equal as a result of this experience. Thank you for existing, Hulk; I admire your work.

Phase 1: The lab - 10/7-10/27

The lab is the period of time where I learn the speedrun. This is done entirely offline, so the lab is a period of Twitch stream inactivity for me. In this case, it was three weeks. I have thought about options for making these stream breaks shorter and/or less frequent.

One option - I could live stream my practice sessions. Lots of people do this, and several people have recommended to me that I do this. Each time I re-consider this option, I end up in the same spot; I think my practice effectiveness would suffer too greatly if I did this. Focus is a superpower.

A second option - I could work-in streams where I am not speedrunning. I do not see myself playing games casually on stream, but I do think that the lab time period could double as a good time to work on a perler from the game that I just completed. Maybe that’s the thing I start working up to live streaming. I would legitimately like to make more perlers, so it kind of makes sense. TBD.

Anyway, back to the lab, it was long. Mickey is only 22 levels, and 6 of those levels are a boss fight with no other obstacles. That means I spent on average an entire day of practice per level. It was harder to learn this run than I was anticipating it to be. For an extremely cute game starring Mickey Mouse, this game is tough!

Phase 2: show time (10/28-11/11)

On 10/28, I stream Mickey for the first time. Yesterday, 11/11, was the last stream. Over these 15 days, I stream 8 different days. I total 26 hours and 30 minutes of live-streamed attempts. I attempted 398 runs in that time, of which 12 runs reached the finish line - defeating Pete and beating the game.

Over these 15 days of streaming, I can feel the community at my Twitch channel growing. I am making more friends. I have more people interested in my projects, and I feel more connected to the projects others are working on.

I can also so strongly feel how vital to my trans identity streaming is. I get harassed presenting as myself down the street from where I live. I now live in a red state. Without the safety of being able to present however I want while engaging with speedrunning, trans life would feel much, much bleaker to me.

Phase 3: celebrate, reflect, recharge

The celebratory purchase I made recently connected to speedrunning is I finally got myself a new NES (the system prior to the Super Nintendo, SNES). I have wanted a new NES for years, and with the recent success I have had with speedrunning SNES games, it felt like the right time to make an addition to the family:

Expanding my speedrunning options! This is called the AV Famicom, a later-model of the NES in Japan

In terms of reflections, I can definitely walk away from Project Mickey happy with what I have been able to achieve. I am proud of the final run and how much work went into its execution. I am also happy with my friend-making progress.

During this grind I had game development on my mind. Remember how I was making a video game and then took a break and then started only talking about speedrunning?

I think I am now at the other end of that. Now that I have experienced three front-to-back speedrunning grinds, I feel like I am in a different headspace.

When I first left my corporate identity behind, I envisioned dedicating my time to making video games and speedrunning. That is actually exactly what has happened. It has been a tumultuous road, though.

When I stopped working on game development a few months ago, I was feeling very defeated with it. I had made several pushes to try and find collaborators that went negatively. I was tired of sharing my progress with everyone I was in the routine of sharing progress with. I have complained about this several times on this blog, but I have continually lacked community around game development. I work in too much isolation. There’s no positive feedback to keep the engine running.

My experiences with speedrunning this year have done a lot to re-contextualize the time I have spent on game dev. In speedrunning, there IS positive feedback. There’s actually a leaderboard that measures your performance with a numerical value. I decided to put a lot of earnest effort into increasing my numerical value performance scores, and that effort has led to said scores increasing.

The thing that game-dev Robbie can’t help but notice though, is that my work habits - hours spent per day, level of focus demanded of myself, long streaks of daily work - are all the exact same while I am speedrunning as when I do game dev. I am putting the same effort into speedrunning as I was into game dev. I am working just as hard, just as long. I am persevering in all the same ways.

Except now, in speedrunning, people are telling me how great my effort was with a number score. People are impressed. Well, what is game-dev Robbie to think of this? Game-dev Robbie thinks that she was doing a REALLY good job at game development, too. Not a soul other than my partner is expressing this to me. There’s no evidence of it in the real world. But it was happening. Seeing the exact same effort lead to success in a different domain indicates to me that my game development progress was probably a bit better than I gave it credit for. Accomplishing things in speedrunning is causing a retroactive pride of sorts with what I have been able to do with game development up to this point.

The Robbie sitting above both speedrunner Robbie and game dev Robbie observes this disparity in encouraging work feedback, and SHE thinks that this is a great observation, but, also sees the identified issue as something external that can’t be changed…at least not immediately.

High level Robbie is seeing that praise cannot fuel game development’s engine. We tried and ran out of gas. Actually, when I first started this blog, the largest initial reason was to try and get a greater feeling of satisfaction from my game development work. Game development is not speedrunning though. This will be praise-less work for far longer than learning a speedrun is. I need to figure out how to reconnect with game development with these new perspectives.

Anyway that is all from me! Have a great day and thank you for reading <3

trans gun owners for kamala :(