Jankmaker is an early-access world-building toolkit for creating explorable first-person environments inspired by classic PC and console RPGs.

Generate complete towns, paint roads and terrain, create forests, place houses and scenery, adjust building styles, and immediately walk through the world you have made.

You can construct everything manually or use Jankmaker’s generators to quickly create the foundation of a town, village, neighborhood, or strange fantasy landscape. Generated environments remain fully editable, allowing you to reshape them into something entirely your own.

Choose between crunchy PS1-inspired visuals, smoother N64-inspired rendering, or a cleaner unfiltered appearance.

No coding is required

Jank by Design

Jankmaker is supposed to be a little janky.

The program is inspired not only by the appearance of older games, but also by the unusual tools, limitations, workarounds, and creative restrictions that shaped them.

Jankmaker favors:

• Chunky geometry
• Billboard sprites
• Low-resolution textures
• Simple lighting and materials
• Limited but understandable systems
• Fast construction over technical perfection
• Strange results that can become part of a world’s personality

Some of Jankmaker’s restrictions are intentional. Older games and software often produced memorable worlds precisely because their creators had to work within strict limits. Jankmaker attempts to recreate some of that feeling while still giving modern creators useful tools.

The goal is not to compete with professional engines such as Godot, Unity, or Unreal in complexity or graphical fidelity. The goal is to provide a faster, stranger, and more approachable way to build retro worlds and games.

Intentional limitations are separate from Early Access bugs. Broken features, crashes, data loss, and serious usability problems are not considered part of the intended jank and will be improved as development continues. if you encounter a bug please let me know within the comments.

Early Access

Jankmaker is currently in Early Access.

The long-term goal is to turn Jankmaker into a complete and approachable game-making engine for creating retro first-person games without requiring users to build everything from scratch inside a traditional engine.

The current version focuses primarily on:

• World building
• Town generation
• Asset creation
• Map exporting
• Retro visual customization
• Exploring the environments you create

Some tools are experimental, certain features remain incomplete, and projects may occasionally require manual adjustments as the program develops.

Future updates are planned to expand Jankmaker with deeper gameplay systems, improved exporting, NPCs, interactions, events, quests, items, combat, and more complete game-creation tools.

Purchasing Jankmaker during Early Access gives you access to the current version and all future updates released through this store page at no additional cost, even if the price increases later.

You are purchasing Jankmaker as it exists today while also supporting its continued development into the larger game-making engine it is intended to become.

Current Features

Level Editor

Create explorable 3D worlds through a simple 2D grid-based interface similar to classic RPG creation tools.

Paint floors, raise terrain, place walls, add ceilings, position scenery, and press Play to immediately explore the result in first person.

Terrain and Slopes

Raise or lower sections of the map and connect areas using slopes to create hills, paths, ramps, uneven ground, and varied terrain.

Custom Skies

Import your own sky artwork and use it as the backdrop for your world.

House Maker

Quickly create houses and other buildings without manually constructing every wall.

Customize building dimensions, height, wall textures, roofs, doors, windows, corners, and other visual details.

Town Generator

Generate complete towns and cities using either organized grid layouts or more irregular organic roads.

Control options such as:

• Map size
• Road width
• Building density
• Building height
• Ground and road textures
• Wall and roof materials
• Doors and windows
• Roof styles

Generated towns can be edited afterward like any manually created map.

Object Editor

Use Jankmaker’s built-in simple 3D modeling tool to construct chunky, low-poly objects from boxes and image decals.

Create props, furniture, signs, storefronts, building pieces, and other objects that resemble the simple models found in early 3D games.

Custom GLB models can also be imported and placed inside maps.

Sprite Editor

Import individual images or complete sprite sheets to create:

• Billboard props
• X-cross scenery
• T-cross scenery
• Animated decorations
• Eight-direction characters
• Basic enemies

Adjust sprite size, animation speed, collision, movement behavior, and other properties.

3D-to-2D Renderer

Import an FBX or GLB model and render it into a sprite sheet for use inside Jankmaker.

The renderer can create:

• Eight-direction world sprites
• Multiple output resolutions
• Animated sprite sheets
• First-person weapon animations

Some model formats or conversion features may require Blender to be installed.

Town People Generator

Combine interchangeable character layers such as bodies, clothing, hair, and accessories to create townspeople.

Generate individual characters or batches of randomized people for use throughout a settlement.

Retro Rendering Styles

Jankmaker currently includes:

• A crunchy PS1-inspired rendering style
• A smoother N64-inspired rendering style
• An unfiltered rendering option

These effects are intended to give users a quick starting point rather than perfectly reproduce the hardware of any particular console.

Map Exporting

Export completed environments as GLB or glTF files for use in other software, including:

• Blender
• Unity
• Godot
• Other programs that support glTF files

Exporting currently focuses on the visible environment. Certain Jankmaker-specific behaviors, materials, billboards, collision settings, and gameplay information may require additional setup after importing the map into another program.

Experimental Gameplay Systems

Jankmaker contains early RPG and boomer-shooter-style systems, including basic support for:

• First-person movement
• Weapons
• Health and ammunition
• Enemies
• Projectiles
• HUD customization
• Title screens
• Resources and skills

These systems are still under active development. They may be incomplete, unreliable, or unsuitable for producing a finished standalone game in the current version.

For now, Jankmaker is best treated as a retro world builder and experimental game-making toolkit, with its deeper gameplay features continuing to grow through future updates.

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Important to note: JankMaker does not come built in with default assets or textures. You will have to import your own. Itch.io has many free textures to use which I personally used in my making of this program. some personal favorites include these talented artists whose work allowed me to create this program. Big thanks to them!: 

Jestan

Bitmap Impact

Little Martian

Screaming Brain Studios

craigsnedeker