On iOS you can switch the game to landscape mode using the glitch described here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AlienInvasionRPG/s/PU5j1ofcmF

I think you can do it on Android, too, using different steps, but I haven’t tested that

Most levels aren’t that different, but there’s a couple dozen where this allows for improved strategies, such as this one:

iPhone has an accessibility feature, called reachability, that adds a swipe gesture at the bottom of the screen that slides the whole screen down about halfway. The bottom half of the screen disappears off the bottom. The top of the screen is now on the bottom of the screen and the top half of the screen becomes an empty void with just a small arrow that can be used to reset everything. If you press and hold the arrow, you can slide the screen around. By using specific swipes with multiple fingers, you can move the whole screen into a variety of positions, not just at the halfway point. You can even slide the screen up such that there is some empty void is at the bottom instead of the top.

While you are pressing and holding to drag the screen around, you can also still draw shapes. This means a few things:

1. Most easily, you can draw shapes that start on the screen, but go off the top of the screen.

2. You can also draw shapes that start on the screen but go off the bottom of the screen

3. If you start trying to draw a shape on the screen in an area where a shape is not allowed (for example, the red striped out of bounds zone), then continue drawing into the void, your shape will only start drawing in the void.

It varies by level, because the designer of the game was not anticipating this, but sometimes walls and out of bounds zones extend outside of the level, and sometimes they do not.

The upshot of all of this, is that there are around 28 level runs out of 396 where you can get faster times using this exploit.

In some cases, this makes the solution more interesting, like level 181. In most cases though, it takes interesting solutions and makes them trivial, like 160.

Questions:

1. Should the Reachability Exploit be allowed?

2. If so, should a flag be added to the run submission form to tag runs that use it?

3. If so, how should it be timed? Typically RTA timing starts when drawing starts (even though in-game timing starts when the user first taps the screen, which could be earlier), but you can’t always tell when drawing starts if it begins offscreen. Sometimes you still can if the shadow is visible. Perhaps if the shadow is not visible you time from the first frame when the reset button last returned to normal size? This would mean runs using Reachability could end up with longer RTA times than in-game times.