Breadsticks– One-day Speedrun

I found a cute, free, tiny platformer by Cosmic Dad– a solo dev at DigiPen– while browsing through the pages on speedrun.com.

It had just came out a couple weeks prior, and had well over a dozen submitted runs. I grabbed it and played through it on my Steamdeck and thoroughly enjoyed it. Three well-designed levels of cute platforming, and I decided to see what my time could be after grinding for a few hours.

Speed techniques

There are only two things to know about the speedrun tactics in Breadsticks:

Super Jump

When in the pause menu, you can press the jump key, let go, press it again, and hold it. When you unpause the game, your foxxo character flies upwards with a lot of speed. I created a new keyboard mapping to make this trick much easier to execute quickly.

By rolling through my right hand (ring finger through thumb), I will get this superjump quickly. Notice that since I am using both hands on my keyboard, I had to bind my left and right clicks to buttons on my left hand.

Additionally, this same strategy can be applied without pausing to the few times the breadstick gets lodged into a wall.

Timing

The speedrun community uses in-game time (IGT) as the official timing for records, and IGT does not increase when in the pause menu. So any time the game is paused, it is okay to take a moment to breathe.

Statistics

After playing for about three hours, I achieved a deathless run and called it for now. It took 68 attempts, and was able to get the final run time down to 1m54.67s, currently ranked #11 on the leaderboards.