Greetings and welcome to Jank Inc.’s third blog post! I’m Jakob Bjerkness, the lead programmer for Curse of Janksbury. For this entry I want to cover the changes we have made to the core game mechanics since the last publicly released build (which you can find here).

Over the winter break the team decided to make several changes to the game design, which in part included a significant rework of how the “jankify” (i.e. object manipulation) abilities functioned. Our goal was to streamline the core mechanics of the game so that they were less confusing to new players without losing too much of the expressiveness that the previous version of the abilities provided.

For those not familiar with the game as it originally functioned, I will recap the core mechanics. Players had the ability to pick up and freely move any “manipulable” object with a power similar to telekinesis. Players also had the ability to freely rotate and scale the object while moving it, with rotation being locked to one specific axis. This gave a lot of freedom to players but also required a clumsy set of controls to learn and provided arguably too much freedom in puzzle solutions. Worse, the player character’s facing direction was not tied to the camera which made moving an object to a specific location unnecessarily difficult and imprecise. Players would frequently get stuck or struggle with puzzles in playtests because of this.

[ An example of how the player character could be facing towards the camera while manipulating an object (noticeable by the outstretched arms). In this case the player can’t see where the object they are manipulating is located because it is off screen! ]

In the new design the telekinetic powers were transformed into a “jank gun” with two primary abilities. First, the jank gun can shoot a jankify projectile. When this hits enemies, it transforms them from monsters back into the townspeople they originally were, but when the projectile hits a manipulable object it will now “jankify” that object and change it into or out of an incorrectly scaled version of the object. Additionally, the object will be rotated into a particular orientation while being jankified. The second ability the jank gun has is to pick up and move manipulable objects similar to the original ability – with primary difference now being that the camera forces the character to always face forwards.

[ An example of the new and improved mechanics. Note the object’s change to an exact size and rotation as well as the automatic correction of the rotation after the object is accidentally tilted. ]

With these changes the designers on the team get much more control over the player’s experience by specifying an exact scale and rotation for manipulable objects. This in turn helps prevent players from struggling with correctly moving, rotating, or scaling an object, and shifts the challenge of the game towards solving puzzles as intended. We hope you will enjoy these improved mechanics and much more when you give the final release a try during this May’s SGX!