Jill Endless Run

Dev diaries
#1

Hello everyone!

I have been thinking a lot on whether to start this Dev Diary or not, but after reading the post “King driven opportunities for teams using Defold” I made up my mind, so here I go.

I am Edgar, I am new to Defold and Lua and I have always loved game programming, although I have never published one.

I have a 12 year old daughter with whom I am happily interacting to remake a game she used to play in my old 386 when she was 4 or so. The game is ‘Jill of the Jungle’, a 256-colored VGA graphics DOS platformer sidescroller with no graphic violence, nice sound effects, and a delightful musical sound track by Dan Froelich.

I think it was Epic Megagames’s first platform game and it was released during the same period as Commander Keen and Duke Nukem. It’s a light-hearted game for the whole family and that’s what I like about it. It is perfect to be implemented as a casual game.

So when I found Defold, I was trying to do a remake of that game, but now that I have gone through most of the tutorials and examples, I think I’ll stay with the ‘Getting Started Tutorial’ and now I want to make an endless runner, thus Jill Endless Run.

4 Likes
#2

Original concept and story (extracted from online reviews)

Concept

Jill of the Jungle is a platform sidescroller game where the player takes the role of the titular character: an amazon woman who can use various types of weapons and enhancements as she progresses through levels solving puzzles, slaying monsters and finding keys in order to advance.

  • The weapons she can use if she is so lucky to find them are a knife and spinning blade.
  • The enhancements provide Jill’s most distinguishing ability: morphing into different creatures, such as a flaming bird, a leaping frog and a fish who can shoot bullets, which allow her to explore specific areas.
  • Levels often feature platform structures that must be navigated precisely by making jumps.
  • Jill has to find plenty of gems and keys to get through the gates and locked doors on every level.
  • Apples are available, scattered throughout the levels, to rejuvenate Jill should her health run low.
  • There are no boss battles in the game.
  • The game can be saved anywhere.

The story

In order to save the jungle from being destroyed Jill must explore the jungle, travel across the dangerous and mysterious Underground land 500 miles away, defeat the forces of darkness and save the prince, who has been kidnapped by an evil green lizardman who wishes to destroy the jungle and build condos instead. Unless Jill saves the prince, he will succeed in his evil cause.

1 Like
#3

jill_jungle_flyer.jpg1262×1700 728 KB

2 Likes
#4

1376357388098.png640×582 21.3 KB

#5

Doing a little bit of Research, you find that there are thousands of 2D side scrolling endless runners on the market, for all platforms, OMG! :fearful:

I will mention only a few I saw on youtube (I have never played these games)
1.- Smurf’s Epic Run (nice art and one touch interface)
2.- Escape from Age of Monsters (Great metal soundtrack!)
3.- Nosferatu 2: Run from the Sun (nice art and game concept, pretty much like the smurfs)
4.- Nun Attack: Run & Gun (funny concept and art)
5.- Treasure Run
6.- And finally the new: Super Mario Run!
In Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto words: “…In this game, Mario runs on his own so you can play it one-handed. And Mario will also hurdle small enemies and small gaps on his own as well, making it very comfortable to play. It’s a new style for Mario gameplay.”

And there are many, many more endless runners! And hundreds of Jungle Runners too!..

1 Like
#6

Super Mario Run description right from the App Store/iTunes :

Description
A new Mario game you can play with one hand!

At long last, Mario jumps into a new adventure on iPhone and iPad, this time playable using only one hand.

Even if this is your first Mario game, you won’t be able to put it down!

In this game, you constantly move forward through the courses while using a variety of jumps to navigate. Your character will behave differently depending on the timing of your taps, so it’s up to you to show off particularly smooth moves, gather coins, and reach the goal.

Super Mario Run offers three different game modes:

  • The first mode features challenging courses for you to complete.
  • In the second mode, you challenge the play data of other people’s completed courses. You compete to see who can finish the course with the most style!
  • In the third mode, you can create your own Mushroom Kingdom using coins collected by playing the first two game modes.

*This app offers in-app purchases. We permit our third-party partners to collect data from this app for analytical and marketing purposes. For more information about our ads, please see the section on how we use your information of our Privacy Policy.

#7

About the title of the game…

Jill Endless Run sounds very descriptive, but not very appealing, right?

Ok, first of all we shall drop out “Jill’s Jungle Run” because there are hundreds of “Jungle Run” games…
Also “Run Jill Run” is out because of Forrest… :grin:

Here are some other name variations I came up with searching synonyms online:

  • JILL’S LEGENDARY RUN.
  • JILL’S HEROIC RUN.
  • JILL’S CRUSADER RUN.
  • JILL’S FEARLESS RUN.
  • JILL’S INTREPID RUN.
  • JILL’S LION-HEARTED RUN.
  • JILL’S EPIC RUN.
  • JILL’S INDOMITABLE RUN.
  • JILL’S TEMERARIOUS RUN.
  • JILL’S VALIANT RUN.
  • JILL’S AUDACIOUS RUN.
  • JILL’S BODACIOUS RUN.
  • JILL’S DARING RUN.

Well I suppose “Jill’s Epic Run” is also out because of the “Smurf’s Epic Run”…

I kind of like Jill’s Indomitable Run

Any suggestions? :thinking:

#8

The New Concept

Original Story
The goal of the original trilogy was to save the prince and stop the evil green lizardman who wished to destroy the jungle and build condos instead.

New Story
The new goal will be to save the princess and stop the evil green lizard queen who wishes to destroy the jungle.

Hmmmm… :thinking:

Those are new characters but same story… :cold_sweat:

Let’s see, in Smurf’s Epic Run, “…Gargamel has casted an evil fog spell to capture all the Smurfs. The whole village is gone…” :thinking:

Ok, if we mix them together, we get:

The Evil Green Lizard Queen has casted an evil spell to turn all the inhabitants of the jungle kingdom into Lizardmen and capture the beloved beautiful young Princess in order to bring back her adored husband from the netherworld.
The whole kingdom is gone and you’re the only one left! Run away from the spell and rescue the cherished Princess in order to stop The Evil Green Lizard Queen from succeeding in her evil cause to destroy the jungle and conquer the world!

Nice! :grin:

p.s. By the way, the husband of The Evil Green Lizard Queen was in the netherworld because he was defeated when he tried to destroy the jungle and build condos instead! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

1 Like
#9

Another New Concept

Ok, so maybe that concept was not entirely a new concept… :disappointed:

What about this?

An Evil Female Reptilian Warrior from Outer Space has landed stealthily in the jungle to rescue her beloved Chief Commander and a thousand of his followers who were imprisoned in a highly advanced inter-dimensional prison below the jungle more than ten thousand years ago by a special multi-galactic space force, and now, using the most advanced alien technology she is liberating all of them, but they need new bodies! So she is kidnapping the inhabitants of the jungle kingdom to implant the consciousness of her fellow alien comrades into them!
The whole kingdom is gone and you’re the only one left! Run away from the alien threat and rescue the cherished Princess in order to stop The Evil Female Reptilian Warrior from Outer Space from succeeding in her evil cause to liberate the ancient prisoners, destroy the jungle and conquer the world!

:scream:

#10

Study:

In the App Store description of Super Mario Run says:

“…In this game, you constantly move forward through the courses while using a variety of jumps to navigate. Your character will behave differently depending on the timing of your taps, so it’s up to you to show off particularly smooth moves, gather coins, and reach the goal.”

It means:

  1. It is an endless runner: “…you constantly move forward through the courses…”
  2. It has many combinations for same action, tap the screen: “…while using a variety of jumps to navigate.”
  3. Again, when you tap the screen, in whatever position of the screen, depending on what Mario is going through in the stage, he will react differently: “…Your character will behave differently depending on the timing of your taps, so it’s up to you to show off particularly smooth moves…”, and for what I have seen in the video Mario can stop and resume running, jump backwards and pause to climb a platform.

Ok, so, one tap, many actions… That’s why you can use it with only one hand: no slide, no positioned tapping…

Mr. Miyamoto said: “…In this game, Mario runs on his own so you can play it one-handed. And Mario will also hurdle small enemies and small gaps on his own as well, making it very comfortable to play. It’s a new style for Mario gameplay.”

#11

Edgaronfo, good luck with your project. I really enjoy platformers, but I missed most of the early platform games on PC (I haven’t even played Commander Keen and never heard of Jill of the Jungle). I think it’s great that you are doing this for your daughter. You should get her involved in the development process!

2 Likes
#12

Thank you very much for your answer @britzl, and by the way, a thousand thanks to you for your examples page at github! :grinning: you’ the man! :thumbsup:

And yes, I want to get my daughter interested and involved in the development process of a video game :grin: (I don’t know if you have children, but at her age it is very important to establish intellectual bonds :wink: ) so this is the perfect excuse to do it, I think we are making progress :relieved:

2 Likes
#13

Cool! I have two sons myself, and my eldest has given me a hand creating tilemaps from time to time. With the rapid iteration flow of Defold it’s really encouraging to see them create-build-play something the’ve made themselves. I hope to get him interested in coding as well, but I think he needs to be one or two years older. We tried a bit of Scratch but he wasn’t impressed by it :slight_smile:

#14

We shall to try harder to get them involved! :sweat_smile:

If you want to take a look at Jill of the Jungle, you can look her up in youtube, there are many videos about that game and I can recommend you a cover from the main song:

It contains video gameplay too!

2 Likes
#15

I remember playing this back in the day! :grinning:

3 Likes
#16

Pkeod :thumbsup:

1 Like
#17

Hello everybody,

I am seeing a lot of demos and games released and it is kind of “tickling” me, even though this is a free-time project, hehehehe

So today I bundled my game into a HTML5 Application to see how it felt on the browser, but when the game loads it throws the following exception:

Cannot enlarge memory arrays. Either (1) compile with -s TOTAL_MEMORY=X with X higher than the current value 268435456, (2) compile with -s ALLOW_MEMORY_GROWTH=1 which adjusts the size at runtime but prevents some optimizations, (3) set Module.TOTAL_MEMORY to a higher value before the program runs, or if you want malloc to return NULL (0) instead of this abort, compile with -s ABORTING_MALLOC=0

I am guessing it is because I have a very big texture… 8192x4096… :fearful:

It shows the same behaviour when I “Build HTML and Launch” it from Defold…:disappointed:

It used to run ok some time ago… :sob:

1 Like
#18

Ah, yes, there are limitations on atlas size. If you plan to launch on mobile you should restrict atlas size to 2048x2048. And I think it varies a bit in a HTML5 application. There’s a webgl.MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE property (Javascript) that defines max texture size. Check here for the specifics of your own device https://www.browserleaks.com/webgl and here for stats http://webglstats.com/ I would stay below 4096x4096 and aim for 2048x2048 to keep all doors open.

1 Like
#19

Thanks for the tip @britzl

Ok, so, yes I plan to launch on mobile and all the other platforms supported by Defold :sweat_smile: so what I’m going to do is I’m going to scale down a bit the animations, but still there is a lot of empty space, is there any way to handle this?

#20

Could you show an example of what you mean?