Oops, I should probably edit that map we made into a general-purpose thing and release it as a Guide for this game, huh?

There you go, all set. Check the Guides tab. :3

We have our first-ever run by someone who isn't us! Congratulations Ditherian!

This did, however, raise some interesting questions comparing the newly-submitted run to ours. We played ours on hardware with a standard gamepad/D-pad controller, whereas Ditherian's run was emulated on MAME with an XBox controller with analog stick. I mentioned even as far back as in the commentary of our 100% run that the D-pad controls are slow and clunky and that any kind of mouse-like controls would provide a huge advantage. I was thinking of something like the Roller Controller, but apparently Stone Age Gamer now makes a Bluetooth adapter that plugs into a CD-i's controller slot and then pairs with any modern controller supporting Bluetooth (including computer mice.) So we already knew that was going to shake things up.

What we hadn't counted on, though, was just how much faster the load times were on emulation--Ditherian's run has something like two seconds per room/screen transition, whereas ours has a little over three. That adds up!

This, of course, presented a conundrum of how to categorize these runs. Lump them all together, advantages be damned? Hardware vs. Emulation? D-pad-controllers-only vs. any-controller-goes?

In the end, after discussion with Ditherian and a few other friends, we decided it was worth a Hardware vs. Emulator split, but (in the interest of not having like sixty categories for a game that very few people even currently run) all controllers are allowed with no distinction for controller types within each category. Load times are such an innate part of the experience with such a profound effect on the overall time that category distinctions are necessary, but controllers... well. Look at Mario Paint (SNES), which can be played on a D-pad rather than a mouse, but that is a horrible idea. Mario Paint's leaderboards don't have D-pad-only categories, and so I don't think this Story of Jonah needs them either.

All of this is to say that we're going to have to pick up one of those Bluetooth adapters from Stone Age Gamer and do better in the Hardware categories. :)

EDIT: That said, we also clarified in the rules that one should describe their setup in the run details, including the CD-i player's exact model number and a description of your controller setup (D-pad? Roller? Bluetooth adapter?) in the hardware categories, along with the OS/emulator version info in the emulator categories. Currently there are no banned setups--Roller or Bluetooth on Hardware is fine--but we should at least know.

Good evening, all!

After getting the Any% run down to what we feel is a fairly solid time unless a faster route through the tree level can be found (which is certainly possible,) we were vaguely curious about what a 100% category for this game would look like.

Without collectibles or anything to track completion, our initial thoughts are that it would involve going through all the content that is currently skipped, specifically the three bonus stages and the optional bird.

1. There is a bonus stage with a ball-fetching minigame that one unlocks by collecting the tennis ball item at the end of the first house stage. This one is well known; anyone who speedruns this game knows it because the ball is right there directly in the player's path. Any% runners looking to skip the unnecessary bonus stage and save time need to treat the ball like a deadly obstacle and jump over it while running through the stage, as the entire run is over if they accidentally collect it.

2. There is another bonus stage with a similar fetching minigame, only with a boomerang this time, that one unlocks by collecting the boomerang item on top of the cabinets (near the top of the screen) in the last (kitchen) area of the house. This one is less obvious because the Any% tactic in the kitchen is to drop to the floor and just run out the rest of the level, jumping over the vacuum as necessary; collecting the boomerang would have to be a very intentionally done act for which the player must go out of their way.

3. The attract mode demo play features a third fetching game, this time involving dishes on a kitchen floor with ice physics. We actually have no idea how to access this one. We assume there must be a collectible dish item (like the tennis ball and boomerang items for the other two bonus stages) somewhere in the three house stages, and we would hazard a guess it's somewhere in House 2 (just because the ball is in House 1 and the boomerang is in House 3.) However, we've never found it. This game is... not exactly popular, to the point that there are no maps or even walkthroughs or anything on GameFAQs that could tell us where it is. But it has to be somewhere... right?

4. This one is our own personal discovery that was one of the first things that helped us get our 6:05 WR, before we optimized the outer pound/forest 2 routing to bring the time down even further. There are a total of five birds to be rescued in the inner pound. The two birds on floor one and the one bird on floor two are needed to weigh down the switch that opens the staircase leading to floor three. Floors three and four have one more bird apiece, and every previous run before we started running this game ourselves (including the former-WR 6:14 run by Tish_Wittenberg) rescues them both. However, the bird on floor three is completely optional; when freed, it will just fly (very slowly) to the top of the nearby columns of kennels, and if the player waits for it long enough, it will drop an extra life. This is obviously not necessary for Any% runs, and therefore neither is the bird. It's just the bird on the fourth floor that breaks the window and therefore leads to the outer pound area.

So we were thinking a theoretical 100% run might just be a run that requires the player to access all three bonus levels and maybe(?) to rescue every bird in the inner pound, including the optional one on floor three. However, we have some questions that we wanted to run by the rest of the community (or, you know, anyone still here reading this) to come to a consensus on what this category would look like.

1. Should a 100% run require the player to successfully complete each bonus stage, or merely access them? Is just getting there then intentionally throwing the game to get out as quickly as possible a valid tactic, or must all five rounds of fetch be completed and the extra life collected in each minigame? (Those minigames are brutally hard, by the way, so we're kind of hoping that one needs only access them and that winning is optional.)

2. Should a 100% run require the player to rescue the optional bird on floor three of the inner pound?

3. If so, should a 100% run require the player to wait for the bird to drop the extra life, or would it be permissible to just keep running as soon as the bird is technically free?

4. No, seriously, where the heck is the dish item to access that dish themed bonus stage??

Good evening, all! (Or, you know, anyone who's still here reading this....)

We have a question about run timing, which we probably should have gotten an official ruling on before we just picked a standard and timed and submitted our runs with that, but never hurts to have it clarified, I suppose.

We've been timing our runs with the understanding that the run officially begins when the player is given control in the first actual house stage. That is, when the player begins a new game, there are a few rounds of pressing start to go through some opening cutscenes...

Title Screen (press start) (fade out) (fade in) Title card (The screen that says "A DOG'S LIFE") (press start) (fade out) (fade in) Cutscene (The screen that starts with the dog sleeping in the front yard outside the house) (press start) (fade out) (fade in) <-- TIMER STARTS HERE First stage begins

If one is analyzing footage frame by frame, an easy way to determine the moment control is given is to be holding forward and run as the yard cutscene is fading out, before the house screen fades in. As the house screen is fading in, there should be a couple frames of the dog sitting still (ignoring the input) and then suddenly starting to run as control is registered, before the screen has faded in fully. For retiming purposes, we act as though the run officially begins the frame the dog starts moving.

We also act as though the run officially stops when the dog enters the final exit chute at the end of the final level. This one's a lot easier to explain for retiming purposes: We act as though the run officially ends the frame the dog disappears off the screen.

These seem fairly in line with standard speedrunning conventions, but if anyone else is around to see this, I just wanted to compare notes on that and see if the Family Dog community (such as it is) has some kind of established official standard.