JasX Games Part 4: Designing BARE

By Locke Esgal

Last time, we talked about Fright and J-fish, but that's not even his biggest game. Many of you have heard of BARE, the fighting card game that's played in quite a few clubs and sims across the grid. I asked Jasdac about his inspiration for the game. He answered, “Fright was also my first complete free to play game. Then a friend sent me to an early alpha of a game, Kemo Coliseum. At the time, I wanted to make a class based fighting game. I started working on it with the working name Domcom. This was summer 2013.”

Kemo Coliseum is a versus game similar to Bejeweled where two people fight in an attempt to strip the armor and lower the health of the enemy with gem combos and special abilities. “My friend sent me the first public alpha and I was pretty hooked, except I'm not a huge fan of Bejeweled. I knew I wanted something where you'd strip your opponent's armor piece by piece.”

At this point, all that was needed was the fine tuning of the idea. A inkling, a thought...anything that might kick start the game we know and love today.

“So I distinctly remember taking a walk around the neighborhood, this was after midnight. When I came back 15 min later. I had the first BARE combat system planned out.  And one day of scripting later, I had the first working version of BARE. Now keep in mind BARE at that time didn't have any abilities, no combat styles other than the default, and no website.I needed someone to test on, and realized I had an old bot that I used for mesh upload back when firestorm didn't have mesh upload features. Which meant I needed to run firestorm for building and regular viewer for uploading.”

This testing period proved fruitful, as now BARE is likely the most played game Jas has made! “BARE grew pretty exponentially and by the time I released it (roughly 3 months after inception) it had almost overtaken TiS. At this moment, BARE has 8.5k users. And the idea of having cosmetic sex-related things for sale (like animation packs) while releasing the game itself for free, seems to be the most profitable thing.”

For more about BARE, check out their page at http://jasx.org/lsl/BARE/ .

Next time, we'll have the last part where we learn a bit about Jas working with another game designer, Toonie, and learn more about Dungeons and Pandas!

Locke Esgal

Editor's Note: You might want to know your opponent some before getting into a BARE match. From what I was told, and saw in group chat, while a squeaky-clean PG-rated match takes no effort, some frisky players take advantage of the options. But there's no shortage of courteous players whom would rather not embarrass new fighters learning the game.