It seems a lot of people have been having trouble with Hurdle Hijinx's subpar programming. I experienced these troubles too, before I finally had enough, analyzed the issue, made an educated guess about what other lazy programming errors were made, and found an exploit to make the thing beatable, and even easy to an extent.

What I believe I've figured out, is that to prevent rapid lane switching, the devs put a small timer (invisible to the player, of course) to prevent you from switching until it reaches 0. Say it's set like, 20. Then every in game frame, the timer counts down until it reaches 0 and that's when you can switch lanes. Of course i don't know the exact number but thats not entirely important. What I think this means though, is that people with rame rates less that 60 require a longer duration before able to switch. My only evidence supporting this is that a friend with a setup that could run 60fps perfectly was able to collect all the feathers from the 3 silver groups at the end without issue, while I, runing about 40 fps, literally could not.

The other issue here, is that nothing was included to keep this timer from being reset before reaching 0. So every time i tried to switch lanes too soon, that timer was reset and it was an even longer duration before i could switch lanes. I directly tested this of course, by mashing left very quickly at the start. What happened was, i switched lanes the first time I pressed it obviously, and then for the following several seconds no switch occured despite repeated mashing. Then after a brief wait, I pressed a direction and could switch. Unfortunately, this once again gives higher framerates the advantage.


So, after figuring out how actually lazy that programming was, i figured there was probably another crucial flaw in it, and thats what led to:

Yeah, they didn't put anything to prevent the timer from counting down while the game is paused. lol.

Literally that's it. Whenever you need to switch lanes quickly, especially in those hectic sections, just tap the switch lanes button, and immediately pause. I went from being able to only switch lanes once in a single jump to twice.

It's gonna make the gameplay a little longer (you of course don't have to do this EVERY time you switch lanes if theres no reason to) but without a doubt you'll be able to make those quick maneuvers. Point and case, i only missed 2 feathers in the 3 silver groups at the end, entirely due to my own error otherwise i would've gotten them. Got the high score after just a few attempts after implementing this.

Unfortunately this doesn't solve other issues, like being punished twice for a single mistake via enemy contact followed by falling too far behind. But, at least it'll make it easier to prevent that from happening in the first place.


Worth noting, pausing will also help you process whats coming up right ahead of you in the course, so there's that benefit too.




Thank you for reading. Of course, please leave a comment if you have any corrections to my analysis, or just let me know how it goes.