Jank Jumpers

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  Jank Jumpers key art

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  Massive crags in the distance

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  Getting ready to start a climb

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  More crag shots

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  Characters users their emote button to celebrate summiting

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  A temple at the top of a crag

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  Character model

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  A double rainbow!

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  Example of procedural level design

Inspiration

Our team fell in love with "obby" games after a group play session in Horizon Worlds. We found ourselves addicted to the challenge of jumping from obstacle to obstacle. More importantly, our session times on headset drastically increased because of the social gameplay.

What it does

Jank Jumpers is a game about traversing up massive crags (floating mountains) with your friends. Up to 30 people in a single instance can venture together or explore solo.

To summit, players must jump and maneuver across obstacles of different shapes and sizes. They'll learn to master the "Jank Jump", which will push them to heights and distances that seem impossible. Don't let the simplicity fool you - the punishment from just one single mistake can be severe! Reach the top of the crag to claim the golden idol and immortalize your accomplishment.

Like skiiing, crags feature varying difficulty levels. At launch, there is one introductory crag, four hand-made crags, and one procedurally developed crag. We plan to add more crags on a weekly basis and update the procedural level every 24 hours.

How we built it

We scaled rapidly by building the world, obstacles, and characters out of primitives. Furthermore, every member of the team actively used Unity (many touching Unity for the first time) to build their own levels and obstacles.

Challenges we ran into

A lot of time was spent by our eng lead, Alex teaching the team how to build in Unity and merge in Git. We had endless amounts of chaos trying to master the merging process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a working prototype of Jank Jumpers in a day, and we're now releasing Jank Jumpers publicly after just a month of development.

What we learned

We learned that building a really fun game can be extraordinarily simple. We also found that leaning into our mistakes and quirks could make it even more fun.

What's next for Jank Jumpers

We're launching Jank Jumpers publicly this week (week of Dec 8)! We hope to add more crags in the short term and more co-op gameplay in the coming months.

Please join us in Discord: https://discord.gg/M5X8PpJJaC

Built With

• photon
• unity