Jerako: The World That Is

Jerako: The World That Is is an MMORPG set in the world of Jerako.

Development
The "game" started not as a game at all, but as a series of tokens done in MS Paint by Joseph Bauer to blow off steam in pharmacy school. After dropping his pursuit of pharmacy, he took a programming class and took computer programming as his new major. At this point Joe realized he might actually be able to do something with these tokens and began creating terrain tiles, range setups, and a battle screen. The project was initially simply titled Battle after the file name of his tiles, "simple battle.png" and would retain the name for the next few years as he worked on it. Initially, only a few races and weapons were included. The original race roster consisted of Humans, Angels, Star Children, Tigers, Panthers, Cheetahs, and Mecha, and all Gaeans shared a single token insignia. The first new race to be added to this was the Wolf, as the Moon Phase was chosen to reflect a Chrono Cross-like field effect.

The weapon roster likewise started out small and grew over time, initially including Swords, Daggers, Thrown Knives, Boomerangs, Bows, Canes, Staves, Rods, Axes, Gloves, and briefly Whips before they were removed due to concerns about the range in the system at the time. Pets, Harps, Guns, and Spears were quickly added, but Guns were changed to Crossbows due to concerns over the fantasy feel of the game and that they'd be overpowered. Eventually, enough weaponry had been added that the list was pared down to a small roster similar to the initial before it began growing again and many scrapped weapons were added back.

During the development process, the NPC roster was filled out with characters pulled from Joe's writing, and eventually new characters were created to flesh out the world. Momma Sweetie became the first character specifically created for Jerako, quickly followed by Granny Pepper to provide a contrast.

After years of not having a proper name for the project, Joe began asking the people in the online communities he was part of for feedback. Eventually, "Jerako" was decided on for licensing reasons. Joe made this the name of the game world at large and placed "The World That Is," another of his prospective titles, as the subtitle.

Development continues on the project, including having revamped the battle interface from a token setup to a marker setup to match the field screens, additional races and lore, and further resource creation.