The Game
Joseph and the Rainbow Robe — JatRR for short — is a mobile endless platformer with a biblical theme. The premise is simple: you are Joseph, jumping across moving planks, dodging flying hazards, collecting fruit, and chasing the Rainbow Robe power-up that sends your score into overdrive.
The game launched on the Google Play Store in February 2020 under my V1 Games label and also made it into the Apple App Store. Start-to-ship took about six weeks.
How It Plays
The core loop is straightforward. Planks scroll toward you. You move left and right, jump from plank to plank, and try not to fall. Hazards fly across the screen — an illuminati eye, a pixel monster, oil slicks — and they cost you lives. Collectibles fly across in the other direction: apples, bananas, grapes, oranges, healing crosses, and jump boosters.
The Rainbow Robe is the signature mechanic. When you collect it, Joseph’s white robe lights up with color, the score multiplier kicks in, and the planks start moving faster. The global leaderboard pulls that last few seconds of survivability out of you every run.
Difficulty scales automatically — the longer you survive, the faster everything moves.
Why Godot
This was my second project in Godot, following some earlier experiments. Godot 3’s 2D engine hit a sweet spot for a project like this: fast iteration, clean scene tree, and GDScript that stays out of the way when you just want to get something moving on screen. The touch input system handled left/right controls with minimal friction, and the AnimatedSprite node made it easy to manage Joseph’s 17 animation frames without a separate tool.
AdMob integration required a community plugin — the official Godot export doesn’t ship ad SDKs — but once wired up it worked cleanly.
The Build
The procedural plank generator spawns platforms at randomized horizontal positions as old ones scroll off screen. Each plank has independent speed and timing, so the pattern never repeats. Flying objects are spawned on a timer that tightens as the score climbs.
Joseph has a full set of animation states: idle, run left, run right, jump, fall, land, and the robe-lit versions of each. The Jesus character appears as a secondary mechanic tied to specific collectible sequences.
Leaderboard integration runs through a backend endpoint — scores post on game-over and the end screen fetches the current rankings before display.
Shipping It
Getting a game onto both stores requires more ceremony than I expected the first time around. The Play Store needs keystore signing, build versioning, a content rating questionnaire, and a privacy policy for the AdMob SDK. The App Store adds its own layer: provisioning profiles, App Store Connect submission, and Apple’s review process. Clearing both review pipelines on the same codebase was its own exercise.
The AdMob integration came after initial launch — it went live in December 2020 as a separate update. The version that shipped was 1.1.48 by the time everything was stable.
The source is on GitHub: cwolsen7905/jatrr