Crullo: Adventures of a Donut

Crullo: Adventures of a Donut

Release type: Demo game
Release date: 1994 (original release)
Levels: 4
Author: A-J Games
Related games: none

The premise here is pure whimsy. After Glubada Pond, I settled on a more traditional platform adventure. Instead of a fish shooting bubbles, we have a doughnut shooting raspberry jelly. Not exactly deep thoughts here, but hey.

With the theme established, the rest of the game was a matter of screwing around with tools. This may be the first game where I did all the visuals in Deluxe Paint, and the result is anything but subtle: piles of random blocks decorated with gradient fills. Likewise for the sound I pulled out an old Radio Shack keyboard that had been gathering dust since the late ’80s. Whether or not the notion is appropriate to a game about a doughnut, all the sounds are musical, or at least synthesized.

The game, then, has a strange atmosphere. The sound effects give it a cold, mournful, and sterile sound. The visuals are noisy and hard to differentiate. The only thing in keeping with the theme is the monsters; for foes the levels are littered with more savory bakery items: bagels, croissants, English muffins. It's unclear what the monsters are up to, and they have little personality or behavior. They're just sort of there, as obstacles.

Avoiding a croissant in Crullo: Adventures of a Donut

The levels are also scattered with monster-based lifts, which serve to carry the player's character across chasms and up cliffs. One problem is that the monster behavior is far from precise, so the lifts spend as much or more time pressing against walls at the start and end of their route as they do trundling along the space between. Result: lots and lots of waiting. Another problem is a Game-Maker thing; when riding on a monster, the monster doesn't carry the character. Rather, the character has to keep walking along in time. Kind of awkward and unfortunate.

The level design received a similar vigor. The developer chose a block set, settled on a starting and an end point, and drew random, winding tunnels and passages and rooms to connect the two. There's the odd secret passage or geographical feature, but there's no assurance that the geometry will match the character’s movements and abilities. The theory seems to be, if it's possible to progress then it's all fine.

Some of the menus were created or altered by Gregory Stone.

- EJR Tairne

Story

Level 4 of Crullo: Adventures of a Donut

Crullo and Crulla were living happily in a comfy little midtown bakery, when an evil witch came in and bought Crulla for a magic spell.

Dismayed, Crullo went chasing after her, but they disappeared. Once he had finished sobbing, Crullo remembered that the witch had said something about living in a castle. There were four castles in the area, though -- Sand, Stone, Water, and Wood.

Which had she gone to? Crullo realized he had to search all four. Well, if he had to, he had to.

But first, out of the bakery. Crullo hopped off the shelf and rolled out of the building. Luckily, the clerk's back had been turned. Dodging an army of policemen, Crullo made it to the closest castle, the one of sand. Trembling slightly, he entered the building.

Instructions

Level 1 of Crullo: Adventures of a Donut

 ____________________________
|    KEY     |    FUNCTION   |
 ---------------------------- 
 Home (7)    = Jump to the left
 Up Arrow    = Jump upwards
 PgUp (9)    = Jump to the right
 Left Arrow  = Roll to the left
 Right Arrow = Roll to the right
 Down Arrow  = Duck
 Space Bar   = Squirt jelly
 ____________________________ 
|   RING     |    POWER      |
 ---------------------------- 
 Glass       = 100 points
 Gold        = 1 life point
 Silver      = 10 points
 Gem Studded = Extra life

Credits

Everything: Eric-Jon Waugh

Edit this at your leisure. If I may say so, this would be a great game to test your new characters in before putting them in your own game. For practice, you might want to add more levels to this game, such as a fire castle, where the walls are all burning and flickering. Maybe an air castle, with invisible walls and clouds as background. Or possibly a steel castle, with all kinds of peculiar gizmos in it.

Background

A sidescrolling platformer where you take the role of a doughnut in love. One of six games I developed for a certain Recreational Software Designs, the designers of the toolsets and engine that I used for my games.

It's a little rough, as I was using a comparatively primitive version of the tools during its design. Some retroactive tweaks to the menus and a few other features were provided by Gregory Stone, the lead programmer. I'm not as crazy as I could be about the changes. But there they are; this is the finished game.

Don't ask me why I used cheesy synthesizer noises for all of the soud effects in the game. I honestly couldn't tell you, at this point.

Availability

Crullo is distributed with Game-Maker 3.0, as well as several of its demo incarnations -- including the CD-ROM Today Disc #12 (June 1995).

Also available on several shareware compilation CD-ROMs, including:

• Software Vault: Games 2 (January 1995) and
• Beachware's 1000 Games for Windows and DOS (November 1995).

Archive History

Crullo was retained as part of the archive from the game's inception.

Links

Interviews / Articles

• The History of A-J Games, Part Eight
• Laser Light (DIYGamer)

Listings

• archive.org entry
• demu.org entry
• Absolute Games entry (Russian)
• games.mail.ru entry (Russian)
• Entry at Game-OST.com (???)

Social Media / Discussion

• DOSBox for Android discussion
• Games that no one has played on NeoGAF except you (NeoGAF.com)

Misc. Links

• Mysterious cutscenes (YouTube)
• Play Crullo online

Downloads

• Crullo: Adventures of a Donut (460.8 kB)
• Level 1 (sand) map (509 kB)
• Level 2 (stone) map (388.7 kB)
• Level 3 (water) map (466.9 kB)
• Level 4 (wood) map (185.2 kB)