Mighty Jill Off

Mighty Jill Off
Title screen for Mighty Jill Off.
Developer(s)	Anna Anthropy
Publisher(s)	Independent
Designer(s)	Anna Anthropy
Platform(s)	Windows
Release	2008
Genre(s)	Platform
Mode(s)	Single-player

Mighty Jill Off is a 2D platform indie freeware video game. It was released in 2008 by video game designer Anna Anthropy. It stars a submissive named Jill, who has a boot fetish. She is forced to climb up the tower after her Queen kicks her down it for, in her words, being a "greedy slut." The gameplay requires Jill to jump and glide through obstacles, and is noted for its high level of difficulty. Jill has infinite lives, allowing players to keep playing from the various checkpoint. It serves as an homeage to the 1986 arcade game Mighty Bomb Jack. She was featured in the 2010 platform game, Super Meat Boy, a game also noted for its high level of difficulty.

The game's BDSM and lesbian themes were implemented by Anna, a lesbian BDSM practitioner, for the purpose of providing legitimate "dykes" in video games; she criticized the games industry for providing lesbian characters made by males, arguing that they are nothing like "real dykes." The difficulty was alson meant to symbolise the relationship between Dom and sub. The art was illustrated by James Harvey, who in particular made the designs for Jill and the Queen. He designed Jill with a somewhat cartoonish appearance, as well as depicting her as dumpy, where the Queen was designed as sexy and authoritative. Mighty Jill Off has received praise for its BDSM themes Rock Paper Shotgun and Game Set Watch. It was also praised for its high level of difficulty, with both GamesRadar and Bitmob listing it as a notably difficult game. 1UP.com included it in among its list of favourite free PC games of 2009.

Gameplay and scenario

Gameplay in Mighty Jill Off, depicting Jill mid-jump.

Mighty Jill Off incorporates several BDSM themes into it. It stars a masochistic lesbian named Jill who has a boot fetish. She is kicked to the bottom of her Queen's tower for acting like, in the Queen's words, a "greedy slut." Jill attempts to climb back up the tower and return to her Queen. Once she does so, she is given affection from her Queen, only to be be told to do it again after being constricted and have a ball gag inserted into her mouth.

Some of Mighty Jill Off's gameplay is lifted from the 1986 arcade game Mighty Bomb Jack, such as the jumping mechanics, as a tribute to it. Players can control Jill in three ways - moving, jumping, and gliding. Players must utilize all three of of her abilities to get through the game. For example, in the gameplay image to the left, she must glide through a series of spikes slowly, accomplished by tapping the jump button numerous times while in the air. There are three types of obstacles - spikes, fire, and spiders, the latter often moving to attack Jill when she comes close. Touching these things will kill Jill instantly, forcing her to start at the most recent checkpoint, typically defined by a change in room. Jill has infinite lives, allowing players to die as many times as they like without having to start the game over. The game length is estimated at 10-20 minutes for a player's first time through.

Development

Mighty Flip Champs was designed by Anna Anthropy, also known as Auntie Pixelante, who implemented both perversion, lesbians, and BDSM themes due to her affiliation with all three of these concepts. It was released in 2008, and was also designed by Harvey James and "A Distinguished Gentleman," who provided the artwork and music for the game respectively. She designed Mighty Jill Off to feature "dykes and perverts" due to a lack of "real dyke characters" and "dyke desires," arguing that while "supposed dykes" are seen in commercials, these characters are "written and drawn by men." As a result, she feels that "they don't look like us, they don’t express themselves like us, they don’t lust like us." In implementing BDSM themes into the game, Anna describes the challenges to players who lead Jill through the game as being similar to those of a top who leads the bottom through a scene. One of the levels, a green room with a number of spiders in it, was suggested by artist James Harvey to change the surroundings to black and the background to red, thereby making it "spider Hell." However, she decided against it.

Follow-ups

A harder version, entitled Mighty Jill Off - Jill Off Harder Edition, was released some time after the original version. Anna described it as being similar in execution to Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, which was notably more difficult than its predecessor, Super Mario Bros. She made it with the intention of reusing assets from the original game such as sprites and backgrounds, but making sure that none of the challenges are recycled. She also made it as a result of Jill Off being compared to the notably difficult freeware game I Wanna Be the Guy. She also made a follow-up called Jill Off with One Hand, which features "OneSwitch" gameplay, a type of gameplay requiring only one button, often for the sake of the disabled. where players cannot move left or right, and can simply jump to stay alive as long as possible. It was created over the course of Buy Nothing Day, where she rationalized that it made more sense to create rather than consume on this day. It was also made preceding an interview with a mobile games studio, figuring that it would work well on cell phones. The protagonist Jill was featured in the 2010 platform game Super Meat Boy, which featured several characters from games, many of which are noted for their intense difficulty.

Art design

The character artwork for Mighty Jill Off was created by James 'HARVEYJAMES™" Harvey, though Jill herself was already designed by Anna in sprite form. Harvey was wary of doing work that was BDSM-themed, citing how it's easy for something both cartoony and sexual to make the viewer feel uncomfortable. He used the Japanese harem anime genre in particular as an example. He added that there is a fine line, in something like this, between "cute and funny" and "repulsive," and that if it seems like the artist was "getting off" from drawing this, the player is "probably going to want to throw up." In designing the BDSM relationship between the Queen and Jill, he wanted to design it in a way that people in the BDSM community could identify with it. However, he also wanted to avoid alienating people who were not into it. As such, he used European comics as a model for his art work, showing admiration for the unflustered, permissive manner in which sexual content is portrayed. He also cited specific Japanese animators who in his eyes successfully portrayed sex in animation, such as Monkey Punch, the creator of Lupin III.

Harvey designed The Queen based a loose description by Anna, and wanted to make her "sexy and authoritative," as well as a "fully grown human with relatively realistic proportions." He designed her to be an "amalgamation of every lesbian friend I've ever had who I've also secretly been attracted to." He initially designed her with a veil, but felt that this was too superfluous and girly, preferring to adorn her with spikes instead. He attempted to design the title screen's background to "emphasise the drama of a situation, or to expressionistically symbolise the characters in the scene." However, there were hurdles; He originally envisioned the Queen's tower to be a smooth, straight one, but felt that it would be too phallic, which would be meaningless symbology given the game's content. Later, Anna and Harvey held a contest for people to contribute fan art for the game; the five winners won hand-made Mighty Jill Off activity books, which included activities such as creating make-out partners for a group of repulsive, tongue-waggling oafs, as well as writing a poem for the game's Queen. He scanned one of the books and posted it online, allowing others to contribute and send in their drawings. The book features several BDSM-related themes.

Jill's design was intially between two ideas - a "funny little megaman character" or a grown woman- both approaches, he says, having their own pitfalls. The former could come off as too much like the Japanese lolicon-styled art, while the latter could make the story seem too serious. The Queen's more realistic design made him question whether a child-like Jill would be appropriate considering. He designed several versions of Jill, all with different proportions, and sent them to Anna, asking her to pick her favorite, choosing to avoid "over-thinking it" by allowing Anna to use her instincts in picking the best design. One of the designs he compared the proportion to Mario, described as a "standard video game design," while another he described as having "slightly realistic" proportions, which he compared to Link's of The Legend of Zelda series. This is the most realistic that he went with the designs, believing that going too realistic could make it too difficult for people to identify with them and diminish the humorous elements of the game. He also intended to design her as "dumpy and podgy" to make her more lovable. Anna told Harvey that she preferred characters with more realistic proportions; as a result, he ended up with a design that was three and a half heads tall. Due to her submissive position, he designed her to be an "innocent" who looks "eager-to-please", with "benign, wide eyed facial expressions". While he designed a close-up of Jill for the title screen early in the design process, the evolution of her character resulted in him having to redraw it to fit better with the game. He employed different colors to demonstrate Jill's feelings for the Queen; he used a rose tint to demonstrat her "blissful display of affection," while using a grey wash to demonstrate her sadness when she is shut out, as Anna told him that he should limit his colors to shades of black, white, and red for the cutscenes.

Due to her being almost entirely black in her rubber fetish suit, He intended on adding some red to her design in order to make her stand out from the background. However, he felt that this compromised the idea, making the fetish suit look more like a "crazy wrestler costume." He decided to keep it all black, as opposed to adding grey to it, commenting that it made her look too much like Batman. He toyed with adding the monogram "J/O" to her chest, similar to how the eponymous character in Mighty Bomb Jack had the initials "BJ" on his, but the idea was discarded early into the process. He noted that one difficulty in designing the suit for the opening cutscenes would be that rubber latex suits are very shiny, and "gross lolicon manga porn is very shiny." He hoped to be able to strike a delicate balance, though felt that the equilibrium between the two wasn't achieved in some scenes. However, he was satisfied with his work in the end.

Reception and promotion

File:Mighty Jill Off BDSM.png

A cutscene from Mighty Jill Off, demonstrating both the Dom/sub relationship between Jill and the Queen as well as Jill's bootfetish.

Mighty Jill Off has received positive reception, in particular for its difficult gameplay. Retronauts editor Jess Ragan gave note to Anna for understanding the quality of its inspiration, Mighty Bomb Jack. 1UP.com listed Mighty Jill Off as one of their favorite independently-developed freeware games in 2009. Gamasutra listed it as one of their runner-ups for the top five best indie games of 2008. On two separate occasions, IndieGames.com listed Mighty Jill Off as "game picks;" first for the original version, and the follow-up to it, Mighty Jill Off - Jill Off Harder Edition, the latter described as a "delight." GamesRadar's Nathan Meuiner listed it as one of the "most ruthlessly punishing indie games," commenting that the difficulty level may make players question whether the "pain of a million deaths is worth the pleasure awaiting" players. James DeRosa did a similar list, though limiting it to games referenced in Super Meat Boy. He included Mighty Jill Off in this list, giving credit to Anna for coining the genre "masocore."

It has also received praise for its insight into BDSM and the Dom/sub relationship. Rock Paper Shotgun's Kieron Gillen called it an "interesting examination of the master/slave relationship, with her in the domme position," though he called his words "art wank." He comments that a common thing to say about people who play certain games, particularly difficult games, one has to be a masochist. However, he adds that Mighty Jill Off demonstrates that the characters are masochistic as well. He compared the Dom/sub relationship to the player/game designer relationship, pointing out how similar to how the Queen makes Jill go through these ordeals, the game designer makes a game for the player to go through. Another Rock Paper Shotgun editor named Alec Meer described it as a "wry, subversive examination of why videogame protagonists put themselves through a torturous amount of struggle to reach their objectives." Bitmob's James DeRosa praised her for implementing elements and ideas that most games do not cover, describing it as a "hypersexualized, bondage-themed platformer" which Anna uses to explore the "power dynamics of sexuality and the hegemony of male and female sex roles in video games -- as well as the significance of difficulty and reward as a design method."