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.

JasX Games Part 3

By Locke Esgal

    In the previous part, we learned about how JasX managed to succeed in game creation, but Jas has also had a few mistakes. While games like TiS, BARE and Fright have done extremely well, one game didn't quite top the charts in sales.

    “jFish. Nobody plays jFish," Jasdac Stockholm explained, "I wanted to take on 7seas, but I guess fishing just isn't popular on SL. It's a bit of a niche, something you could do when there was nothing else to do. jFish was a really good learning experience for website-scripting though. By today, jFish has 1377 players. I'm not even sure if I've made back the Lindens I spent uploading content for that game, so I guess it's pretty dead in the water.”

    Not to be deterred by a single loss, Jas moved on to some more familiar projects, ones that are still played today. “jFish was released in early 2012. Since jFish was not doing well, I decided to start anew at an adult game. This time I wanted to explore PVP, so I came up with Fright. Fright is probably the quickest 'big game' I've ever made. ... Oh yeah, mesh came out just as I was rounding up TiS, so Fright was the first game I made where I completely abandoned sculpties, since they're really bad. I think Fright took less than a month and a half to make.”

    During the creation of Fright, Jasdac began to sit down and show his process to his growing fanbase, starting to create on stream for all to see. From these, others could learn how to make their own mesh objects, including potential levels for both Fright and TiS “I also remember streaming a lot of tutorials on mesh. When I made the game I wrote down all the meshes I'd like to use, then I'd sit and stream for hours at a time while I just worked off that list. It wasn't very fun, but some people enjoyed it.”

    “My reason for making Fright was to just make something people could enjoy for Halloween, but it did get some traction, so I made two additional maps and some extra game modes. It was fun all in all, even though the fun of playing died down for me quite fast.”

    Stay tuned for part 4, when we take a look at BARE, what inspired it, and talk a bit about Jasdac's Dungeons and Pandas branch!

Locke Esgal

JasX Games Part 2

By Locke Esgal

    In the previous segment, we took a look at how Jasdac Stockholm of JasX Games got his start in creating his different games. Jas had created a game called Fable of the Unknown that took SL by storm, setting the framework that helped create Tentacles in Space. However, it wasn't his first game.

     “Somewhere there I also made a Halloween game. I think that might have actually preceded all of those. Well before all that tentacle stuff, I do remember making a Halloween puzzle game. Basically just a big haunted house (like Fright). I got permission to rez it and play in one of the sandboxes during Halloween and a bunch of people had a lot of fun with it. Even though it was VERY crude, that game kinda spawned a running gag. In the game you'd first find a shovel, then you'd find a frying pan and pitchfork to tie to the shovel to remove spider webs, then you'd find a key holder to add to it to keep your keys in one place. Then finally, you'd be able to add a bolt launcher to it. The 'shovelnator' made it's way into TiS. I think there might still be a shovelnator poster somewhere in Fright. It's not in BARE though.”


    References to Jas's other games do occasionally pop up in the background of BARE maps, but they weren't the only inspirations for some of the games.  “Anyways, moving ahead to 2010. A friend and I play Borderlands a lot. I decide I want to make a similar thing in Second Life. Thusly, TiS is born. A new function has been added, llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast(), which lets you reduce lag by a lot. Also by implementing a sort of "LOD" which makes monsters only animate when players are near. So TiS is still laggy, but at least it's better than FotU.”

    Even with TiS' success, Linden Scripting Language is notoriously limited for such large-scale complex projects. “Some time a few years ago, I stopped selling and took down the remnants of FotU, because it was a security hole. Right now, TiS is the security hole in by back. Going back, it's awfully scripted.  But TiS is nonetheless where I got my first popularity, if you can call it that, in SL. It's a really good learning experience, if I see something I like, I tried implementing it. It was fun all around to make, even if it's a pain now.”

    “TiS today has 4500 registered users. That sort of game is really not meant for SL, though. It does have some major issues, most of them stemming from it's size and age. High lag, high prim cost, and a steep learning curve makes it not a game for everyone. But it did get some very dedicated fans, and I made enough money to keep going at least.”

    Not all of JasX games were the successes we know today. In the next part, we'll take a look at a game that didn't do so well, as well as some more of the well known games. See you next time for Part 3 of the Jasdac interview!

Locke Esgal

JasX Games

by Locke Esgal

Second Life has always been a beacon of creativity in online sandbox gaming, predating games like Minecraft by years. People have been able to make avatars for people to use, clothing to wear, places to live, and even games to play. One company, JasX, has taken a spin on the usual card games and has managed to create exciting games like BARE, a card-based fighting game, TiS, a first person shooter similar to the Borderlands series and Fright, a Halloween themed scavenger hunt. However, many have wondered about the man behind the JasX logo. Well, I've been fortunate enough to grab an interview with Jasdac Stockholm and got to ask him the big question: How did you get started in creating games in Second Life?

    I came across him coding for his next new game, a branch off from a pen and paper game, "Dungeons and Pandas." After a little persuasion, I got Jasdac to spill the beans on his rise to Second Life fame and his history creating games for the virtual sandbox.

    Jas wrote, “Well, it started off with a flash game someone made. I liked the idea of a furry game with tentacles and went like, 'Wait with my scripting knowledge in SL, maybe I could make something'. So I made a prototype...To position the player, I made a little invisible vehicle the user would have to rez and sit on called a 'walkpad'. My first prototype was just an obstacle course and it was laggy, as well, because sculpt swapping (sculpts had just been introduced) was laggy as s**t, and still is. I just had the little thing as a test. Then I made FotU.”

    "Fable of the Unknown," while not on his current list of playable games, is recognizable to many long time fans as the predecessor to his first person role playing game, Tentacles in Space.

    Jas continued, “FotU was kinda like my previous game except it had very rudimentary combat. You got to pick between 3 classes, I think. You still had a walkpad which would cause people to fall over and it had achievements...But the monsters were now mobile! It was still laggy, but not as bad.”

    Back in 2007-2008, many functions in the Linden Scripting Language didn't exist, so it made certain aspects of coding difficult at best, lag-inducing at worst. Despite this, FotU did rather well.

    “...FotU was my first 'success'; I was so happy when I made 10k Linden Dollars (around 50 USD) from it. It was heavily focused on puzzle solving. It got popular enough to warrant an expansion. The coding was terrible, but it did pave the way for TiS.”

    Ten thousand Lindens is nothing to sneeze at for a first game, especially when you consider most of the JasX games available these days are free to start, save for the 300L TiS. While FotU was a rousing success, Jas moved on to create even more games. We'll move even farther down the path that led us here, along with a glance into Jasdac's current projects in Part 2!

Locke Esgal