Greetings! This is Jank Inc again! We are a group of 6 programmers and 6 artists and this week we are in the process of getting an early pre-beta version of The Curse of Janksbury, together. The Curse of Janksbury, is a 3D puzzle game, where you walk in the shoes of a teenager as he tries to save his hometown from being destroyed by physic forces! I’m Nick, I am another one of the programmers on the team. Recently I have been working on the enemy AI and getting different types of enemies into the game.

Overview

We have continued down the path of overhauling the game. Making improvements and better fitting the scope of the project to the timeframe given to create the game.
To recap, you play as a teenage boy, Marcus- who wields the legendary Jankify gun. You walk onto a street of Janksbury,  best described as a “sleepy midwestern town”, during a wild festival! The festival is called “Jank Festival” and is a celebration of anything that could be described as weird of unexplained. As you take your first steps around you will see people wearing masks of different creatures. This is clearly a celebration but of quite the strange holiday. As you walk down the street, you notice that the town’s mascot (Ippy the Iguana) is in a cage and seems to be downtrodden. “What could be going on?” Marcus thinks to himself. Marcus then opens the cage to free Ippy.  He turns out, to the surprise of everyone, to be quite devious and evil. He goes on to curse the entire town and transforms all the people into monsters!
Ippy seems to have overlooked you since you released him and didn’t turn you into a monster. As you walk around, you notice several objects… seem kind of “jank”. 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 now wield that power! Use this novelty gun to fight off monsters, manipulate objects to solve puzzles, and save the town!
 

Current Build and Beyond

This sprint we adjusted the scope of some of the work that is to be don the artists have buckled down it attempts to increase the flow of art elements being made for the game. They in my opinion have some pretty cool stuff under way. The different sequences that the player will traverse in the game have been almost completely gray boxed and the first one is even becoming populated with art assets. On the programing side, great strides have been made to clean up and improve the feel of the manipulation of objects. The Enemy AI has been refined too (my area of expertise for this game).
I can’t quite speak for all aspects of the game that are getting worked on. But the enemies and the enemy AI that I know well. Improvements have been to the enemy’s ability to traverse the nav-mesh keeping them from getting stuck on small objects or non-existent objects. Another big improvement is that now that the base enemy type has been cleaned up its time to derive all the other enemy type from that base enemy type. This week I spent most of it putting in place all the infrastructure to streamline the process of deriving all the other enemy types from that base class.

Level and Asset Previews

Here are some more images of the game in editor.

[ Ground view from the fair in the opening of the game. ]

 
[ More updated buildings with more detail. ]

[ Still just place holders for enemy types as assets in engine, coming soon. ]

More to Come

Stay tuned to the here and the other social media accounts of Janksbury. As the semester goes on you will hear from others working on the project and what they are working on. May 5th is when “The Curse of Janksbury” launches online along with other UW Stout Game Design Student games at the bi-annual Stout Game Expo be sure to check it out and play it then.

Pieces of this blog were provided by Eric Hovda with his permission.