Date: Sunday April 20th, 2025
Time: 09:27:10 AM
By: vga256
When Tomodashi first launched in January of 2024, I imagined it was going to be like any other game studio I've worked for: I was going to pick an off-the-shelf game engine (Unity, Adventure Game Studio), come up with a game design, build it out over a few months, and release it.
None of that happened. My experiences over the years working with Unity and AGS had taught me that they were not the right tools for the building small, light, simulation-oriented games I had in mind. After a few weeks into the project, I was both reminded how much I disliked working in Windows (AGS), and how much more I disliked working with Unity.
So, I started building a new engine that would be lightweight, had a drag-and-drop UI like Microsoft Visual Basic, and supported script/code changes at runtime using the Lua language. It took the rest of 2024 to build the basic functionality, and it eventually became the Exigy Shareware Construction Kit.
At the beginning of 2025 I realized that it might be a good idea to let other people goof around with Exigy and provide feedback on the overall usability of my UI design. The problem was, I didn't have a good way of distributing builds, and letting people send in feedback.
So I figured - why not build a little interactive website that would let me distribute new builds, update a mini-wiki for documentation, and get feedback from users? I already had some php scripts that I had been using to build various websites, and a tiny scripting language that worked almost like Markdown.
I wanted something that was lightweight, easy to update and patch, and built without any external libraries so I wouldn't have to deal with software updates. I thought: this will probably take me a week to hack together, and I'll even release my mini-website-generator as its own piece of software.
It took me three months.
Today, kiki - a tiny homepage construction kit has been released into the wild. It is an expression of how I prefer to work: I like to write things up in a text file, copy the file over to the web server, and let the website software do the rest of the hard work. Sure, there are many other static generator/CMS -type tools out there already, but this one does many things that the others don't, like running a built-in wiki. And just for fun, I released kiki in both "shareware" and "registered" editions: the shareware version is free, but doesn't include some really nice features and themes... the registered version comes fully loaded. All for $15 CAD ($11 USD) - enough to buy a burger, fries and Coke in Canada.
The past year and a half has made me appreciate how Tomodashi has made this big weird loop as a business. It started as a standard indie game studio, and then - out of pure necessity - became a developer of game engine/tooling, and then again out of necessity, a developer of web software. If someone had told me that I would release a php-based website builder in 2025, I would have told them they were insane for even suggesting it :)
As of today, I am releasing daily patches for kiki and resuming development on Exigy. The next big task for Exigy and kiki involves adding Tomo's BBS forum support, so users can read/post feedback, bug reports and make feature suggestions.