About Me

Hi, thank you for visiting the ABA Games website.

My name is Kenta Cho, and I am the person behind ABA Games. Game development has been my hobby for more than 40 years.

In the 1980s, as a child, I started programming in BASIC on a Sharp PC-1500 pocket computer and became fascinated with computers. Later I moved to machine language on the NEC PC-6001 so I could make faster action games.

At that time, I read "Mycom BASIC Magazine," which published games submitted by readers. It showed me that original games could be made with compact code, and it taught me the value of sharing source code. Having my own game, "METEORITE," published there convinced me I could make games worth sharing.

I was also influenced by 1980s Namco arcade games such as Dig Dug and Xevious. Those games taught me how much a new game mechanic can matter. Nintendo's Game & Watch and various other LSI games showed me that even a simple core idea can lead to many different kinds of play.

I have made more than 500 games, all released as open source and free to download. Because of that, volunteers have ported some of them to platforms such as Mac, Linux, and consoles.

Some of my representative games are Noiz2sa, my first shmup for Windows; Tumiki Fighters, which became the basis for the Wii game Blast Works; Gunroar; rRootage, where I used my BulletML language; Torus Trooper; and, more recently, Paku Paku, also known as "1D Pac-Man."

What drives me is making games that I want to play myself. I enjoy taking ideas from places like "Mycom BASIC Magazine" or old arcade games, borrowing or changing them, and turning them into something playable. To work quickly, I also build my own tools and libraries, such crisp-game-lib. I am not attached to any particular technology. I want to use whatever language or means that makes the game more fun.

I still want to keep making new game rules and algorithms. Lately I have been interested in ways to use generative AI to create entire games. I want to work at that meta level and see whether AI can help produce genuinely new games.

I wrote about these recent activities in more detail in my e-book, "The Joy of Small Game Development." I tried to write it in a way that conveys the fun of game development to as many people as possible. I hope the book, along with my games and their source code, can give other people a starting point for making their own.