Bumbling Dwarves

I discovered Koji recently. Basically, it’s a service where coders create templates of projects, including games, for other people to download and customize in whatever ways the programmer allows them to do. Not only that, but the end user can also access the code for the template and make changes to that as they desire.

Figuring I’d give the service a try, I signed up for an account and spent tonight crafting my first game on the platform, a Match-3 clone based on their starter template called Bumbling Dwarves. You can click the link to play, or play it in the embed below!

Working with Koji was pleasant. Honestly, the majority of the time I spent on this project was restyling the open-source artwork I used for this project, as the original images clashed with each other. I wound up coloring the dwarf sprites to be visually distinct, and I softened the lights on the background image.

Using the template was easy, and it made everything simple to customize, just based on the template alone, and for the few code customizations I made (such as changing the color of the selection box) I had full access to the source code (the template was written in React).

The primary way you interact with the code is through Koji’s online editor, which is based on the Monaco editor (the same one that powers VS Code). They give you two ways to interact with the settings files: a visual editor which functions like a form, and the underlying JSON file that you can change in the editor. When I was finished making my customizations (including custom sounds and music), I filled out their short publication form, hit the publish button, and after a few minutes the project was published on https://withkoji.com/, where their projects are hosted.

I can definitely see how this perpetuates Koji’s mission of making app development and MVP prototyping fast, easy, and accessible even to non-coders. If not for those pesky images, I could easily have deployed Bumbling Dwarves in an hour or two.

This was a fun experience overall, and I’m thinking about messing around with Koji more in the near future. At the very least, I’ll be keeping tabs on this cool, interesting service.

If you want to check out other Koji projects from other users, visit https://withkoji.com/