Hi, I'm vga256. I run a game & software lab based in Edmonton, Canada, where I've been working professionally in the industry for twelve years as a programming consultant for game studios such as A#, Wadjet Eye, Headwear Games, and Himalaya Studios, and as a narrative consultant for broadcaster NHK World-Japan.

If you've played Six Ages 2: Lights Going Out, the Blackwell series, Guard Duty, Mage's Initiation, or Primordia, on Mac, Linux or iOS, you've seen some of my previous work already :D

I truly believe that the gaming and internet technology we had in those eras got it right, and many of the technologies that arrived after the mid-2000s were steps in the wrong direction. I built the tomotama design philosophy around that perspective.

My games and internet software are designed to take the best aspects of 80s and 90s software design, and make them relevant for today.

Development Tools

While I love my retrocomputing machines, they are fairly miserable to work on for day-to-day development! I prefer to create new software that looks and feels like old software, on middle-aged hardware.

I prefer working on a mix of relatively old Macintosh hardware that is more than fast enough for development work. The core idea behind running older and slower hardware is to ensure that people who use tomotama software can run it well on anything from the mid-2000s onwards.

Hardware

Kitchen Workstation: 15-inch 2015 Macbook Pro i7

Café: 13-inch 2013 Macbook Air

Music: Sony MZ-R900 MiniDisc Recorder

Software

Pixel Art: Aseprite

Web Language: PHP

Desktop Language: Lua

Markup Language: Bug - my own little invention :D

Source Control: git - a necessary evil :(

Games

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