![]() ![]() When we see games that have bad UI, frustrating to enjoy elements or a core gameplay loop that doesn’t work, that’s not a janky game, that’s just a bad game. The difference between the games in this piece and titles that didn’t work comes down to what the core gameplay loop was. So far in this piece, it would be easy to assume that a bad game is just a janky one with purpose, but that’s not our goal. Whether you love it or hate it is beside the point: these games were never meant to be mass-market successes.ĭesigning a game to be intentionally janky is a lot harder than it sounds, and where I feel novice developers may mess up. They weren’t designed that way to be bad, but they were designed that way to be that specific experience. Width="560" height="314" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen">Īnd that makes it hard to review games like Getting Over it or the other ones mentioned at the top. Again, this is not the developer making something and not having a clue as to what they were doing but knowing exactly what they wanted to design and achieving that goal. I’ve described these games as being “explicitly built” to be this way. From the indie space, I have played many games at this point that aren’t “fun” or “enjoyable” to play but were not designed incorrectly. A major criterion is if the intention of the developer comes through successfully with the game, which is different from just saying a game was enjoyable or not. In a previous post I spoke about my method of analyzing videogames and how they differ from traditional game reviews. It would be easy to assume that janky games are just badly designed, but this discussion gets at the heart of game analysis. ![]() Instead of focusing on making things easy to learn or play, these games are about the intimacy of doing something complicated, or as Tomo put it: “adding more words” to the mechanics. None of the games mentioned would be considered streamlined or feature refined gameplay. Each game takes something that is often very basic in other games and expands or conflates it to extreme measures. Titles like Getting Over it, Receiver, Jalopy, Fear and Hunger, Jump King, Pogostuck and I’m sure many more that I haven’t heard of yet. What we’ve seen from the indie space has been this exploration into “unique” game systems and controls. This is the opposite of the AAA iteration and polish we see from major studios - a company like Nintendo or Blizzard would do everything they can to remove jank from their games. ![]() For the purpose today, we’re going to talk about jank in the form of something designed to be purposely obtuse or cumbersome. For many kaizo games that are about perfected precision, jank is often referred to when sections require luck or something unpredictable to have a chance at winning. Jank is a term that can mean different things depending on what we’re talking about. While these games have a far smaller market compared to mainstream titles, there is something to be said, and studied, about games that go all-in on a singular concept or game design. For this one, we spoke about Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy and the novelty of “jank” videogames. I recently had a great conversation with Tomo Moriwaki as we do every month on my YouTube channel. ![]()
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