The idea didn't come all at once.It accumulated.
During the development of Aoi's game, I had repeated the same tasks too many times. Drawing a sprite meant writing data by hand. Adjusting an animation meant recompiling half the project. Changing a collision meant checking multiple tables that didn't communicate with each other.
Everything worked.But everything was unnecessarily complicated.
One night, after everyone had left, I stayed in front of the PC-98 without loading the game. Just the text editor. I stared at the code for several minutes.
–"This isn't development," – I murmured.–"It's survival."
There were no engines. Not for the PC-98. Not for small studios. Every company built their own systems from scratch, over and over, as if that were normal.
But it didn't have to be.
I started small.A program that could load sprites without writing memory addresses by hand. Then another that allowed defining animations with adjustable timings. Then a basic scene system.
Nothing elegant.Nothing pretty.Just functional.
Without realizing it, I had stopped working on games and started working on tools.
The "engine" wasn't an engine. Not yet. It was a collection of utilities that communicated with each other. They unified what had previously been scattered.
Drawing stopped being about writing numbers.Logic stopped being mixed with rendering.Events stopped being patches.
When Mori arrived early one day, he found me testing something strange.
–"That… isn't the game?" – he asked.–"No," – I replied.–"It's the game of the game."
He frowned.–"What?" –
I showed him.I changed a sprite. Ran it. The change appeared without touching the main code.
Mori stayed silent.–"That used to take hours," – he said slowly.
Sato appeared behind him.–"What are you looking at?" –
I explained the minimum. Too technical, even for me. But they understood the important part.
–"You did all this alone?" – he asked.
I nodded.
Kisaragi arrived later and asked for a full demonstration. He didn't interrupt. Didn't comment. He just watched as I built a scene from scratch in minutes.
When I finished, he crossed his arms.–"This…" – he said.–"This isn't normal."
It didn't sound accusatory.It sounded surprised.
–"You've always worked like this," – he continued.–"But I thought you were just fast."
No one spoke for a few seconds.
–"Since when can you do this?" – asked Mori.
I thought about it.–"Since always," – I replied.–"I guess."
It wasn't arrogance.It was bewilderment.
For the first time, I felt all eyes on me.Not as a coworker, not as a quiet employee, but as something different. Something they hadn't noticed because I had never shown it.
–"With this…" – said Sato.–"We could make games faster."
–"And better," – added Mori.
Kisaragi took a deep breath.–"We're not going to use this for just one project," – he said.–"We're going to do it right."
I nodded.
For the first time, I didn't doubt.I wasn't creating an engine to prove anything. Nor to change the industry. I was doing it because the process could be better. Because making video games shouldn't feel like fighting against the tools.
That night, while adjusting the system, I understood something important.I didn't just like making games.I liked making it possible to make them.
And when I closed the editor, I knew that this small engine—clumsy, incomplete, and limited—was going to change the way we worked.
Maybe not the world.But everything that came next.