Greetings! We’re Jank Inc! We are a group of 6 programmers and 6 artists and this week we’ve released a new pre-alpha version of The Curse of Janksbury, a 3D puzzle game with a very interesting story! I’m Eric, I’m one of the programmers on the team. Recently I’ve been coding a lot of object manipulation for the player and setting up controller support.

Overview

We began work this semester with a major story overhaul and streamlining of our game design. The core concepts are still here but greatly simplified to fit our limited time and resources.

You play as a teenage boy, Marcus- who has a very special novelty gun (the legendary Jankify gun). You walk onto a street of Janksbury, a “sleepy midwestern town”, looking around, you notice that there’s a wild festival going on! This annual festival is called “Jank Festival”, a celebration of the weird, mysterious, and unknown. You walk around and see people wearing masks of different creatures, and you feel uneasy. Why are people celebrating this strange holiday? As you walk down the street, you notice that the people’s mascot (Ippy the Iguana) is in a cage and seems very unhappy. What’s going on? You open the cage to free Ippy… and he turns out to be evil! He goes on to curse the entire town and transforms all the people into monsters! 

Ippy seems to have given you mercy, as you are not transformed into a monster. As you walk around, you notice several objects… seem off. They’ve been jankified. You also notice after this curse has been enacted, your gun has a new glow to it. To every evil power, a good power shall rise against it. You have that power! Use this novelty gun to fight off monsters, manipulate objects to solve puzzles, and save the town!

Current Build and Beyond

Our pre-alpha build is out now here on itch.io. We have been developing this game since September 2020 and within the last few weeks, we have updated and nailed down our core game mechanics, storyline, and level progression. Our - plans for the next 4 to 6 weeks are to create multiple enemy types, cutscenes, improved UI, and add more environmental assets. As a general gameplay programmer, my work in the next few weeks will include adding systems for cutscenes, level transitions, and working on making a clean main menu experience. 

On our programmer team, I’ve been focusing a lot on writing scripts in C# that give the player the ability to manipulate (jankify) and move objects, along with recently using Unity’s newest Input Action Mapping functionality, which makes mapping controls for the user much more efficient. Other programmers in my group have been working on AI development, tuning them to fit our game feel. They use A*Star Pathfinding, a great tool for AI management.

Level and Asset Previews

To understand the feel of our game and just what it means to be in JANKsbury, here are some in-engine and in-editor previews of the “current state” of our game:

[ Buildings with textures and jankified objects ]

[ Updated buildings (grey boxed) with more detail. They will be textured, soon. ]
 

[ A small glimpse into the “Jank Festival” street ]

[ A sneak peek into potential enemy types, coming soon ]

More to Come

Keep up-to-date on the our progress here and on our other social media accounts for more details throughout the spring semester as we craft the world of Ippy the Iquana and Marcus, and be sure to tune in on May 5th when “The Curse of Janksbury” launches online along with other UW Stout Game Design Student games at the bi-annual Stout Game Expo.