About
Owner and main developer of KOE Games. Eighteen years between the first server that never shipped and the games on this site — most of that spent learning in public, on projects nobody ever played.
KOE Games is one person. I design the games, write the code, cut the art down to size, and build the site they live on. That is not a pitch for how heroic it is — it is the reason the games are small in scope and finished properly rather than broad and half done.
Where I learned what code was. It never got off the ground — but something about building the world other people play in stuck, and it is more or less what I have been doing ever since.
Years of not writing a line. Worth saying plainly, because the useful part of this history is that starting late and stopping for a while did not turn out to be fatal.
I picked up Lua and built a GTA roleplay server. It worked. It grew to seven thousand members and held around two hundred players a day at its height, and I ran it for a few years before closing it down.
Running it taught me the half of this job that is not code: that a community needs somewhere to be, that people tell you what is broken only if you make it easy, and that shipping to a live audience is a different discipline from building something alone.
Many games started, none released. I do not think of those as wasted — that is where I found out what scope I can actually finish, which is the single thing most responsible for the games on this site existing at all.
I moved to native iOS and stayed. Deepline and ShopHaven Idle are both built this way — no engine, no third-party packages, no analytics, nothing phoning home.
The Elder Scrolls, Halo, The Witcher, and Cyberpunk 2077 — big worlds you are trusted to wander around in. My own games are a fraction of that size, but the thing I am taking from them is the same: somewhere that keeps going whether or not you are pushing it forward, and that rewards poking at the corners.
The Discord is where builds get posted and bugs get reported. Anything else — support@koegames.com.