How I got a sub 2-minute run on Normal Mode

1. Successfully pull off the double boss glitch. This gives you the effects of double damage for the whole run. You can do this by getting the final tile to kill the boss in phase one as you move UP into the cards and lose your final heart. You need to get a phase one time of around 42-44 seconds for the run to be on a good pace. The only way to be on this pace is to have your final damage tile spawn on the first or third row when the boss does the second part of his cards attack.

2. You'll die but no worries! Simply hit continue and you'll enter phase two and notice some laser will fly down the middle randomly and cards shooting at the top of the screen. This is the doubled boss. Complete phase 2 by grabbing the final two damage tiles so that they deal the final two bits of damage on the boss. This will set up the next part.

3. Do phase skip between phases 2 to 3. You do this by grabbing the damage tiles lying around in the transition phase 4.4 seconds after the boss duplicates you. This will kill the boss immediately, sending you into the final phase.

4. Now for the final phase. Grab damage tiles quickly and make sure your health is down to one when you are going to kill the boss. You now have to pull off skip-bunnies by dying from going sideways into a laser or going up into a card as you grab the final damage tile. I'm not sure if this has to be with your real body or if it can be with your clone. If you've done everything correctly you should end with a sub 2-minute time!

Good luck and I'm hoping this encourages some more people to go for PB's on Normal Mode Glitched! The run is awaiting verification right now but here's the YouTube link for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66DZKvY3doQ

How to Go Fast

How to Submit a Proper Speedrun

Hey I'm writing this because some people don't know how or just need a refresher on submitting runs. So here are some tips on how to do it:

Get a Screen Recorder

There are lots of good free screen recorders out there that you can download. Most people on the discord (go join it by the way love to have you there) recommend OBS but there are other ones that work too. No one wants to see a run recorded with your shaky iPhone 6. 

Recording in-Game Audio

Recording in-game audio is not something you have to do unless it is a 1st, 2nd or 3rd place run but it's welcome and you should probably do it if you submit a lot of runs.  If you do want to record audio you can use OBS or most other screen recorders. Make sure the site you're playing the game on has the audio for the game (like Cool Math Games for example) and make sure the audio is on. I play on Lexaloffle Games and is my recommended site to play on (link if you need https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30767) There are no ads, it has in-game audio and you can use full screen.

Make Sure the Run is Smooth 

No one likes watching a speedrun that looks like it's run on a potato of a computer; especially the mods. So to fix this try downloading an ad blocker on your computer if the site you are using has a lot of ads or just play on a site with no ads. This should help your computer run faster and make happy mods. Also, make sure there aren't any weird pauses in your runs and make sure the time of your run is clear.

Upload Your Video to YouTube   

After you have a run you're happy with, upload your video to YouTube. Then you can copy paste the link to submit the run and make sure the video isn't private so the mods can see.

Make Sure Your Run Description is Right

When you're submitting your run make sure everything in the description is correct such as whether you used glitches, what glitches you used, the correct run time and the right YouTube link to your video.  

There you go! You just submitted a quality run and didn't get publicly shamed on discord. A winner is you.

In-Game Clock: An Important Secret (All Categories)

The Boss has 10 HP per phase.

As long as you collect the first 9 tiles within about 1 second of the moment they spawn, you're doing perfectly. A tile spawning under your feet will be no faster than running to collect it from the corner in 0.9 seconds.

You can only really save time on Tile10---the tile that kills the Boss---because his damage/death is immediate, unlike the tile spawns which are fixed relative to the clock. Tile 10 should be collected as quickly as possible.

The perfect run would require Tile10 spawning under your feet in every phase. The time saved by this RNG would be pretty small (maybe 2 seconds per run), but if you're trying to save every second possible, it is essential.

If you want to see this concept demonstrated, you can check out my 3:21 Hard Mode Glitchless run. 3/4 of the final tiles spawn right under my feet, which is how I was able to get 3:21. 

(You can also see that I almost ragequit and closed the window after the 10th Tile spawned relatively far away in Phase 2.)

Road to Sub-1:30

Here's a nutshell of the strats that I used to achieve 1:15:

1. Double damage glitch works by being inside a Nickel when a magic tile spawns in it. (This will require you to take damage). Unfortunately, it is completely random where the tile spawns, so getting this glitch will likely require many resets. This glitch can compound onto itself, perhaps infinitely.

2. After you've gotten an extra tile from glitch #1, it is possible to get an additional extra tile for every transition phase. In order to do this, damage The Boss until his HP is 2 or more. Then kill him by collecting the remaining tiles in rapid succession. If you are too slow, his HP will settle on 1, and you will not get the extra tile.

3. In order to maintain extra tiles between phases, you have to collect them before the fight phase ends. Then, do not collect them until his Health Bar becomes active for the next fight phase. If you collect them during transition, they will not come back.

4. To skip the ending sequence, you have to die at the same time that you collect the final tile that kills The Boss in Phase 4. The easiest way to do this is to walk into a tile located under a laser beam, with your main character. NOTE: Walking into a laser beam-tile with the "mirror" character will generally not achieve this glitch.

5. If you have tiles during a transition phase, you can perform another glitch that I'm proud to have discovered, which I simply call the Phase Skip glitch. This is performed by collecting a tile so that The Boss takes damage the instant his health bar becomes active for the next phase. This requires VERY PRECISE TIMING. And I suspect that there is an element of RNG in addition to the tight timing requirement, as I could never get it down to 100% consistency.

Because a phase starts by The Boss' HP bar dropping from full damage to 0, a tile collected at this precise moment fills his damage meter which has not yet fallen, causing him to die and skip directly to the next transition phase.

However, his HP bar will remain vulnerable during the ensuing transition phase. Meaning that you can continue to damage him during the transition phase(!!!). 

This glitch can be performed to skip Phase 2, Phase 3, or Phase 4.  However, I find that it is most valuable to skip Phase 2, because the transition between 2 and 3 is very long. You want to be able to inflict damage during that time, instead of standing around doing nothing.

The double-damage glitch

Q: Why this guide?
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A: This is the first game I speedrun seriously. At least, I'll be able from now on to tell that I've done serious speedrunning at some point in my life.

Q: What's the double-damage glitch?
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A: Double-damage is a glitch that makes the game spawn two damage tiles instead of just one. That means two hits on the boss every 3.33 seconds instead of just one. In theory, you could spawn three or more, but getting two is hard enough already.

Q: How does it work?
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A: Well, the basic idea is to 1) let the boss toss a coin and get the damage tile to appear on that tile, and 2) collect the tile at most 5 frames (1 frame = 1/30 sec, so 5 frames = 0.166s) *before* the coin touches the ground. No matter if you get hit as long as these two steps are followed. Of course, step 1 is completely RNG ; there is (almost!) no way to control where the tile appears. Although 0.166s seems like a small window, it's actually not that bad, because, by the time you realize that you have a chance of getting the glitch, you've (in my experience) already left the tile, and, by the time you come back to collect the tile, you're inside the 5-frame window.

Q: How long does the glitch last?
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A: It depends. The first three times I got the glitch, it only lasted one phase. As soon as the next phase started (i.e., as soon as the boss' health bar started decreasing), that's it. Back to glitchless, which sucks.

However, earlier today, I managed to actually get the glitch to last from one phase to the next. I unfortunately wasn't recording that *one* time, so I can't show how I did it, and I can't replay it to look at how to do it. If you look at the speedrun linked below and watch the part from 1:44 to 1:56, you will notice that, at the end of the phase, two tiles appeared. Because I didn't know what to do at the time, I just collected the tiles, and, on the next phase, I was back to normal --one tile. But earlier today, I did something different. I'm not sure exactly what I did, but I think it involved either getting the tile after the next phase started, or getting the tile before the phase started, but at most 3.33 seconds before it started. The 3.33 seconds are important because 3.33 seconds is the delay between when you get a tile and when the next one appears.

I'm going to have to look some more at the game's code to see how to reproduce that.

Q: Is there *any* way of increasing the chances to get this glitch?
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A: Yes. Since the moment you collect a tile determines when the next one appears (with a delay of about 3.33 seconds), it would be possible to make sure that the moment you collect the tile is 3.33 seconds away from a possibility of getting the glitch. But even there, there are 8*5=40 tiles to stand in. So, in your best attempt, you still have a 2.5% chance of getting the glitch to work each time you attempt it. So, if you attempt the glitch, say, 6 times in a run, you have a 14.1% chance (about once every 7 runs) of getting it at least once during the run. That is, with perfect reflexes and perfect execution (and I'm not there yet at all!). Besides, because of what we explained in the last question, the sooner you get the glitch, the better.

There might even be another way to increase that to 2.6% (well, 2.5625% actually) or even 2.625% per attempt depending on some timing, but I don't think anybody should even care about that. That would make a good difference too though.

Q: What causes this glitch?
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A: Kindly enough, Bridgs, the developer of Just One Boss, made the game's code available on GitHub ([click here](https://github.com/bridgs/just-one-boss/blob/65622c1172ec8bd67f9371dd91e12b04a5e93e6d/just_one_boss.p8)). I've looked through it for a couple of hours to understand the code's structure (which, in my opinion, has both technically amazing design and terrible structure quality, lol), and here's why this glitch happens.

Lines 631 to 637 represent the code that is executed for the damage ("magic") tile every frame. Essentially, the code means this:

Every frame:
- if the tile is occupied by a coin, then:
-- remove the tile, and
-- request another tile in 10 frames
    
Now, the code that starts at line 639 ("on_hurt") is executed when the tile gets touched by the player. If you look at line 641, you will notice that "frames_to_death" (which represents the number of frames before the tile gets removed) is set to 6. And at line 756, we also request another tile in 100 frames (3.33s), to simplify. To sum up:

When the tile is touched by player:
- remove the tile in 6 frames, and
- if the boss is not dead, then:
-- request another tile in 100 frames

So then, the question is, what happens if you get the tile 5 frames or less before the coin begins occupying the spot the tile is on? Since you touched the tile, the game will request another tile that will appear in 3.33 seconds. But, when the coin lands on the ground, since the 6 frames haven't elapsed yet, the tile hasn't been removed, so the game will also think that a coin occupies the spot the tile is on, so it will also request another tile in 10 frames (0.33s). *That's* where the glitch comes from.

Is this explanation true? Consider this speedrun :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zek4d49rznU&lc=z23pifh5fzajezft1acdp434ilyvsexhcjfxaln1n2pw03c010c.1524923253474762
If you look at 1:31 (YouTube video time, not in-game time), you will see that I get the tile exactly one frame before the coin lands on the ground, which is the last possible frame to do the glitch. As expected, the grey box (which starts appearing 10 frames before the tile actually appears) appears immediately. And, at the beginning of second 1:35 (indeed about 3.3 seconds later), a second tile appears.

The Skip Bunnies Glitch

I've found a glitch that can completely ignore the time from the final death cutscene and the rabbits. In order to cut about 14 seconds from your final time, you must be at one health at the end of the final stage, and die right as you collect the last damage tile. You will go to the death screen for losing all your hearts, but it won't center the player and health bar like usual. Don't go back to menu, just wait, and the boss will die in the background, rabbits and all, the congrats screen will play, and it wont have counted any time from the whole time you were dead. I have a video of me doing it here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ClzZyEC1GsGTObFCD1L5x-EvW4lAwjpV/view

watch from about 4 minutes to the end, and you'll see what I'm describing. The cards stage Is by far the easiest place to get the glitch. One of the only ways to get the glitch is to be right above or below the damage tile, and move up or down onto the tile as a card flies over it.

Naam	Auteur
How I got a sub 2-minute run on Normal Mode	Meep9373 2 years ago
How to Go Fast	glugglejug 6 years ago
How to Submit a Proper Speedrun	Portinport 2 years ago
In-Game Clock: An Important Secret (All Categories)	Daborshy 3 years ago
Road to Sub-1:30	Daborshy 3 years ago
The double-damage glitch	Anthonya 6 years ago
The Skip Bunnies Glitch	qwertyuiop512 3 years ago