Genesis

It was a late evening one autumn when my brother, Patrik wanted to show me something he had created. What he showed me was a 2D graphics test, one similar to others he made earlier.

This, however was running on an engine that performed a lot better than any previous prototype. ”Best of all, this one works on any OS.” he said.

I felt a rush of excitement. The engine was based on the bleeding-edge HTML5 standard and components related to it. The potential was huge. I told this to my brother. He concurred.

This was the moment when we decided to do what we had wanted to do since we were kids - start a game development company. We had a long way to go.

Fast forward a few years to 2016, and all the critical pieces had come together. We had grown to a team of six guys, all eager to work for a common goal.

After the 2017 global game jam we all knew this team would work perfectly together. We started thinking of names.

Naming a company turned out to be harder than we ever imagined - most of the cool and obvious names are taken. For example, we liked the name ‘Skeleton Crew’ - turns out that’s a metal band. Pretty much everything else we tried after that was either taken by some one-man studios in places like Puerto Rico, metal bands or something we didn’t want to associate with.

One night, Jussi and Patrik were sitting in a Skype call and banging on a random name generator, discarding one possibility after another, until they landed on the combination “Jumping  Skunk”.
It was certainly unique. It had clear imagery, it didn’t mean anything special, and it was memorable. Funny enough, the initials formed JS - the common abbreviation for JavaScript, the “language of the Web”.

We decided to adopt a public image as The Cult of the Jumping Skunk, so as to stay memorable and prompt the maximum amount of questions about what we are. Perfect for a game development studio.
On the business side, we’d be known as the plain, boring and forgettable-sounding JS Games.

The plan was set in motion. Fast forward to March and we’re signing the documents to found our company.

A month later, Patrik was fully committed to the company, working into the wee hours of the night on bringing our high-performance game engine up to the latest spec and adding all the core features gamers expect to see in a modern engine. Jussi stayed with his day job, but started working well into the night as well in order to create the kind of high quality assets we’d need in order to get our point across: the time of the Web as a gaming platform was dawning.

The present

Our engine works. Very soon it will be ready for its first real-world tasks.

Our immediate focus is on getting a mind-blowing tech demo ready for Boost Turku Demo Day, August 17th. Expect a video around that time. The playable demo will be released openly on the Internet soon afterwards. As soon as it’s ready to go, we’ll shift focus towards our first commercial title.

The Future

Getting a game out on the market is never an easy task, and we’ve decided to open ourselves up to customer work in order to sustain ourselves while we give our first 3D title the level of love and polish that it deserves.

Therefore, allow us to plug ourselves:

We’re a team of software specialists focusing our efforts on game development for the Web platform. We’re currently fully equipped to provide high quality 2D titles in a fast and cost-efficient manner. In the near future, that capability will expand to 3D and Virtual Reality on the Web.

We can make everything from seating arrangement planning applications to action-packed arcade games - if you are in need of high quality, modern applications for the Web, send us an email at our business address: contact@js-games.com. We’ll reply within the same day. :)

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