Just Junk!

The earth is gone and you are stranded on a tiny planet.
The only resource available is the junk falling from the sky.
You haven't been this lucky in your entire life.


How to play:

Collect junk by mining meteores. Use it to enlarge your planet, place, buildings, and turn it into other resources. Unlock new buildings such as junk factories, junk farms, junk labs and more. Don't forget to defend your colony and expand it to reach more junk meteors.

Controls:
  • Place trash blocks - Right click
  • Remove trash blocks - Shift + Right click
  • Move camera - Hold left click
  • Zoom - Mouse wheel
  • Mine meteors - Left/Right click
  • Toggle fullscreen - F4
  • Restart game - Shift + R
  • Center camera - C
  • Pause game - Escape
  • Get infinite resources - ?
Screenshots:
Alt text
Alt text
Credits:
  • Ivar - Programming + Replies
  • Knutone - Hard mode music + Sound effects + various sprites
  • Fred03 - Buildings + GUI
  • llemeliell - Intro sequence + Background + Music
  • Inspired by the games: Factorio, Cockie clicker and Dwarf Fortress.

Developer notes:

We have participated in GM48 a lot of times now. But I have always felt our games have been kind of samey. it's either a platformer or a top-down game with a semi-original mechanic. You always go form level to level and defeat enemies. Last round, we tried to solve the problem by changing the artstyle, but I didn't feel it solved the problem. It still felt the same. Before this round though, I suggested to the rest of the team that we should focus on making a game that feels different to play. And I think we have succeded. Just Junk has no main character. And it's more like a stradedgy or idle game than an action one. We went more for a more relaxing feel where you just expand your civilization and watch your buildings do everything for you.

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  • havik
    Patron

    Great little game! The only minor annoyance I have is when the buildings are deselected when you click to place but it's an invalid position - meaning you have to reselect the building. Since the camera rotates slowly it sometimes throws your placement off and then you have to click it again, whereas from other games I'm used to just being able to carry on placing. So yeah - only a minor annoyance. Apart from that, great job :)

    Definitely something you should keep working on!

  • Veralos
    Lv. 38

    Really cool game. I like how you get to expand your planet over time with piles of junk. The resources seem fairly well paced in that you have to put some effort in acquiring things but you don't have to wait too long either. I think the idea of using the junk both to expand your base and to create buildings is pretty neat. The graphics look really nice, though I'm not too sure about the camera spinning effect. I also really enjoyed the music - it fits the mood of the game well.

  • Mimpy
    Lv. 26

    Very unique game, almost like a cross between a tycoon and a tower defense, and this seems like a concept that could very easily be expanded into a full fledged larger game.

    The pacing seems very well done too, just the right amount of floating space garbage and flaming meteors to keep progressing at a good rate.

    There did seem to be an issue with centering the camera in fullscreen mode, it caused the background to become misaligned, which meant you could see meteors leaving large trails on the screen, and you could also see your base where it was before centering. Seems to be an issue with aligning some kind of surface with the camera, when you pan the camera after centering it corrects itself.

    • C0DERP1GLET
      Lv. 36
      C0DERP1GLET Coder of Just Junk!

      4yrs ago

      Thanks for giving feedback. As I’ve said in other replies, we might continue on this and make a post jam version. Content is very easy to make in this kind of game.

      Yeah, we know about that bug (the reason it isn’t in the description is that we already have reached the character limit)

  • Nyveon
    Patron

    I love this game. I'm really surprised this doesn't have more ratings! It's great!

    Here's my base right before beginning the end. And for spoilers sake, I won't show my base before finishing the game. But imagine the same thing but with shields and a lot more turrets.

    I found a bug: build two false idols, break the second. You're back in normal mode now. My main feedback would be maybe streamlining the controls a bit, they definitely took a while to get used to.

    Had a ton of fun playing this, really well done. Congratulations! :D

    • C0DERP1GLET
      Lv. 36
      C0DERP1GLET Coder of Just Junk!

      4yrs ago

      Thank you for sharing your base. You seem to have played quite optimally.

      Already knew about that bug, but you reminded me to put it in the description.

      Thank you for leaving feedback. I’m really glad you liked it.

  • Alex Fantastico
    Lv. 4

    This was one of my favourites for this game jam. I love games with a dynamic world, and this was the most dynamic game world I've seen in the jam so far, other than mine. Even if it was just trash piling up on trash, it feels really good when the world is actually doing something on its own without me having to micromanage things. I actually didn't like the magnet turret because I just wanted the trash bags to hit my base. I really liked the laser turret, though, because it ended the asteroid clicking portion of the early game, which would have gotten really tiresome eventually.

    I built a pretty epic trash empire, but I didn't get any screenshots before the end of the world. I found several bugs lurking in the far corner of space, though. If I had to criticize anything, I'd say having the left click being both the action button and the camera-panning button was quite annoying, and the title "Just Junk" is a bit bland. I overlooked this game for quite a while before trying it. Glad I eventually did.

    El's World
    Submitted

    El's World

    • C0DERP1GLET
      Lv. 36
      C0DERP1GLET Coder of Just Junk!

      4yrs ago

      Ok, here is the backstory: Our first GM48 game title was “Archies Arrow” followed by “BrainBot”. We then realized that both these names were alliterations in alphabetical order (AA, BB). So we continued naming our games in that pattern. You can see all of them at our team profile. This time, we realized that JJ would be a quite hard name to make (since J is the least used letter in the alphabet). So we begun by brainstorming some names with those initials (Join Jam, Jump, Jump!,Just Junk!, etc.) We went Just Junk and made a game from there.

      I don’t know if agree with you with the magnet. It removes micro management and makes the asteroids more important. But if we continue with this, we might make them more late game so you cannot make them until your base has gotten big. We might also rework the controls to be more streamline.

      You don’t have to take screenshots. I would have liked to see your epic trash empire, but leaving great feedback is equally valuable :D

      • Alex Fantastico
        Lv. 4

        That explains the title then. Double K might be challenging, too.

        Honestly, I still think it's better to have the asteroids place junk tiles for you than for them to be turned into the junk resource by the magnet. Manually placing junk tiles is the biggest (or, I guess, smallest?) bottleneck in the game, so letting it happen naturally is preferable. And houses generate plenty of the trash resource passively, and are much cheaper than magnets.

        I actually think you should add a built in screenshot feature that saves a big picture of your whole base. Because manually getting a picture of the whole thing in pieces would be really tricky given how the camera slowly rotates around all the time. I really would have liked to have a memento.

        • C0DERP1GLET
          Lv. 36
          C0DERP1GLET Coder of Just Junk!

          4yrs ago

          Hmm, I didn’t get noticed when I recieve nested replies, and I don’t know if you do either. Can you reply again, or edit your comment if you got noticed and have read this.

          Ok, you’re probably right about the magnet. To be honest: I have almost never played through the game myself. And Tero also seems to be restricted by block placing.

          An automatic screenshot sounds like a good idea. Thanks for sharing it.

          Yeah, K will be also quite hard. Most English words start with C instead. But a lot of the K words that do exists would fit quite good in a game title: Kitten Kingdom, Kind Knight, Killer Kid, Kitchen Knifes.

  • Tero Hannula
    Patron

    I enjoyed my play. I played it pretty long before I realized there was a shop :'D Here is picture of my junk planet before buying anything https://imgur.com/JhiAcJB I found optimal stategy, collect enough junk until you can make pillars etc. make them thin and sparse, so junk asteroid hits them, then dig junk with mouse (which is faster than clicking asteroids). Just collect that junk faster than meteorite strikes them. Make these large and sparse, so you don't mind if meteorites destroyes bit of them.

    I decided to record ending, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6oXt16t3XQ

    I was bit disappointed at ending, I really hoped some giantic asteroid just squsihing all on its path ^^ It was fun game. Did the meteorites get a bit bigger with false idol? Atleast I thought so.

    ps. I found question mark too, also found particle effects, shown in the video

    • C0DERP1GLET
      Lv. 36
      C0DERP1GLET Coder of Just Junk!

      4yrs ago

      I can tell you that your first strategy was the core idea of the game at the beginning. We thought that you should collect junk from asteroids and use it to expand your base, so that more asteroids would hit it. We then added buildings, and then they took over the entire game. If we will continue with this game, I think we might try to shift the focus more to the asteroids. And to prevent the same mistake to happen again, we might make the shop start opened.

      Yeah, the ending is a bit anti climatic (And long I think). Especially when your base is as well developed as yours. But it seems like it hasn’t been that easy for everyone. A friend of mine said his base got destroyed by meteors as soon as he placed the false idol. Yes they get bigger, and it spawns much more of them. It can be quite dangerous if you haven’t built a large base.

  • Sindre Hauge Larsen
    Patron

    This is one of my favourites so far. Loved it! I found a question mark box, built my way over to it, but it didn't seem to do anything. I built like 50 idols and 20 false idols.

  • Fachewachewa
    Patron

    Really fun game. The core loop feels good, and I thought the progression was pretty well balanced. My main issue is the speed of asteroids. It's really hard to click on them.

    Also, I left a game running in the background while playing other stuff just to see, and ended up with this :D

    Shrinkoban
    Submitted

    Shrinkoban

    • C0DERP1GLET
      Lv. 36
      C0DERP1GLET Coder of Just Junk!

      4yrs ago

      Yeah, the red asteroids are quite fast, but we wanted them to be a real threat. Or else, the junk turret would be even worse.

      Nice. That’s some epic junk formations. It seems like you had plenty of defence. And patience.

  • Riuku
    Lv. 19

    Enjoyed it! It's a fun clicker-builder and it feels good to stack tons of production buildings and see the junk production rate go high. It was pretty easy, though, and I didn't really run into any issues with the meteors even on my first playthrough. Entering post-false-idol did put me on my toes for a second, when I realized I needed to stack up on my turrets, but even then I had so much junk that I could spam a ton of turrets and have no problem for the rest of that phase. In any case the whole playthrough was a fun click-fest with a constant sense of accomplishment. The easy difficulty doesn't really bring much replayability value, but I guess that's not a huge issue for a jam game anyway!

    In addition to the level of difficulty, I think there would be some room for improvement on the controls and interaction. I would've liked to see an indicator that tells me when I'm trying to place a building where I can't put it or if I don't have the resources to do it. Currently, it just fails if the requirements don't meet and I have to go and click it again at the shop panel, which can get a little frustrating when I'm trying to mass build a big town of buildings at once. Another minor issue about the controls that I found was that the game was ALMOST playable with only the mouse but not quite! I needed shift every once in a while. I often started leaning on my left hand while clicking about on the mouse with my right, and then just occasionally had to reposition myself just to press shift for a second.

    Oh and I want to mention that I really enjoyed the main music. Somehow, even though it was super repetitive, it didn't get boring at any point. It reminded me of traditional russian/slavic songs, while the instrumentation, simplicity and fast melody was in line with the tiny busy island in the void of space.

    • C0DERP1GLET
      Lv. 36
      C0DERP1GLET Coder of Just Junk!

      4yrs ago

      Thanks for mentioning how you percieved the difficulty. I totally agree with you. I would like it to be more challenging. But I think it's important that it's accessible too. Urgh, why can't everybody just be exactly the same?

      Yeah, the controls could be better. Fixing them and displaying error messages when you place buildings were right on top of my to-do-list when the deadline came.

      Thanks for describing your experience thoroughly. It really helps to get insight of how you experienced the game :D

  • Chris
    Patron

    This is probably what future Earth will be like. Cool strategy/sim game, I like that there aren't limits on how big the junk-civilization can get.

  • illdie
    Lv. 12

    I absolutely love this game! The worst issues I had were just to do the building being a little finnicky. I also ended up building four false idols just for fun, but when I accidentally destroyed one of them the music returned to the original song, even though my others were well along destroying the world. Anyway, great entry! This definitely seems like a great game to play while listening to a podcast or chilling in a voice call with friends, and I'll probably come back to it for those purposes in the future.

    • C0DERP1GLET
      Lv. 36
      C0DERP1GLET Coder of Just Junk!

      4yrs ago

      Four false idols?! God, you are crazy. Thanks for reporting the bug. I can't believe I let such a basic bug in. And I can see what you mean with the building placement.

      The feedback we have recieved so far has been much more positive that I thought. We might consider expanding on this idea in the future. Check that later if you have any podcasts to listen to :D

  • Happysquared
    Lv. 15

    Of the other resource collecting/clicker games I've played so far in this jam, I think this one is my favourite because I like the addition of meteorites. Personally I like having a little bit of risk and conflict. Games like cookie clicker and other resource collection games don't really give that and I feel they just give a sense of gratification because you've moved on to the next level. For Just Junk! I liked that there was a risk of your junk planet being antagonised. Though I feel after building the laser the meteorites became a non-threat until the False Idol. That being said, I'm probably not the target player for a clicker game if I was looking for more action. In terms of a clicker game though, I think this did it really well and felt the meteorites are a nice twist!

    I saw a comment that said they found it hard to click the meteorites. I think that might be because they were zoomed in on the planet as you can zoom out super far to see them.

    Might have found some bugs. I was often looking elsewhere besides my planet to look for more junk and clicking c after that made a lot of white streaks across my screen. Also saw a random floating question mark like the help button in space.

    • C0DERP1GLET
      Lv. 36
      C0DERP1GLET Coder of Just Junk!

      4yrs ago

      I wonder why there are so many incremental games this round. You usually doesn't see a lot of those. We didn't plan making one. The original gameplay idea was that you should expand your planet in order to get hit by more meteors. Giving you more junk which makes it easier to expand.

      Yeah that might be the case. The in game description doesn't show how to zoom. I just took that for granted.

      Yep, that's a bug. The help button (which is an object) apparently runs it's regular draw event even if it shoun't. Well, we might just call it a feature. A secret perhaps.

      Thanks for leaving feedback! It's always helpful to know how you experienced it.

  • Luke No Further
    Lv. 14

    Brilliant brilliant brilliant - this game is SO up my street, I love it! It kept me going for ages, very addictive. I got all the way to false idol and I was like oh I bet that means more meteors? So I made a ton of turrets and just kept spamming regular idols while I enjoyed the spooky music. I sank a bunch of time into this game, not sure if it had more content after what I played? The world didn't actually end with the false idol for me. Anyway - brilliant idea, loved slowly and organically building up the planet on a heap of junk and being an unstoppable fortress of junk turrets and magnets and farms - really fun and engaging.

    • C0DERP1GLET
      Lv. 36
      C0DERP1GLET Coder of Just Junk!

      4yrs ago

      Thanks for the feedback. I'm really glad you enjoyed it! If you really liked it, I can recommend Kwisarts and Haviks submission. It's the same core loop but more polished.

      I think you stopped at a pretty good time. You could have waited for the false Idol to finish it's ritual, but it takes about four minutes and I don't beleive it's that fun. We mostly wanted a place to put the spooky music :P

      Time, yeah. You could easily spend over an hour into this. It's debatable whether that's good or bad for a jam game though.

  • 89o
    Lv. 18

    In my opinion, the main gameplay is a tad too complex for a jam game, but I can see the fun in it. The meteorites were so fast and unpredictable that I never had the chance to destroy them before they hit my poor little town. Maybe you should also mention that you have to place buildings "inside" blocks, not "on top of" them.

    • C0DERP1GLET
      Lv. 36
      C0DERP1GLET Coder of Just Junk!

      4yrs ago

      Thank you for being the first one to leave feedback!

      One thing you might have missed is that you can mine regular meteors to receive junk. I suspect you didn't notice that regarding how far you got.

      We was debating for a while whether the buildings should go "On top" or "inside" blocks. Sorry for the confusion. I think I will add some screenshots to fix the problem.