The web portal

The website nicodeux.com is an online leisure portal: mini-games, illustrations, animated images, contemplative pages, and other informative texts in an atmosphere inspired by traditional and popular Japanese culture. This site is a tribute to the era when most pages on the Internet aimed to share knowledge, display original things, or simply be fun and beautiful. This portal is constantly evolving, with content regularly added.

Without falling into nostalgia or pastism, nicodeux.com offers modest content that goes against the grain of e-commerce, social networks, and solicitations through notifications or emails. Internet users can thus take the time to freely visit the site to play or view an illustration to relax and unwind for a few minutes, whenever they wish.

This online leisure portal has no other purpose than to be different and friendly, a place like many that existed at the dawn of the Internet. The kind of site you add to your favorites to visit from time to time to clear your mind.

The designer

nicodeux is a French developer who began working on games and websites in 2002 when he joined the Studio Tanuki, an independent studio based in Paris and Lyon. Alongside other developers, illustrators, and designers, he contributed to creating websites, online games, and promotional content for a wide range of clients, from small local businesses and associations to major players like LEGO and Ferrari.

However, most of Studio Tanuki’s work consisted of self-produced content: animated short films, video games, and websites created using Macromedia Flash (back when Flash was still cool and promising). These projects combined dynamic content with light and impactful illustrations inspired by Japanese culture. By integrating HTML, JavaScript, PHP, and Flash/ActionScript, nicodeux developed client-server tools from scratch, enabling Flash game sessions to be saved and reloaded, and implementing dynamic player rankings. Starting in 2003, he created community sites and discussion forums to promote Studio Tanuki’s productions, introducing social tools such as friend relationships, private messaging, photo sharing, and mutual trust confirmation. In addition to his development work, nicodeux managed the community of fans and thousands of players through regular events and mini-games on Studio Tanuki’s sites. The studio won several awards for its productions and participated in international festivals.

In 2010, nicodeux joined an international group of developers in a community open source project aimed at recreating the client-server structure of old commercial MMORPG video games. This global project provided him with the opportunity to collaborate with developers from around the world (Western and Eastern Europe, North America, Russia, China, and the Middle East), enriching his experience in managing human relationships despite cultural differences. Focusing primarily on game content development, nicodeux honed his skills in Python, C++, and SQL, while improving code quality and practicing client-server communication.

He was later appointed as the leader of one of the project’s six major components, recruiting and training new contributors while ensuring data and code integrity across other components. nicodeux continued to make significant contributions to all aspects of the project, focusing on adding and maintaining game content scripts and animated elements that players would interact with during their game sessions.

The project garnered significant interest from players and other developers, leading to numerous forks over the years, although few achieved the same level of recognition or longevity as the original project. In 2025, this open source project remains active with a frequent influx of new contributors, ensuring its continuous updates, often on a daily basis, by the core developers. Several major milestones have been delivered since the project’s inception, and the game is currently used on numerous servers, both in its original form and various forks.

Since early 2022, nicodeux has dedicated part of his free time to adding mini-content and reviving old web games for the online leisure portal nicodeux.com.