How Toucan Nexus started

Toucan Nexus started with my son wanting to play something that wasn’t a game. I’d built a fun, interactive nexus graph to help explain a business network I was struggling to explain in words. It let people explore the connections for themselves. A friend had built a separate AI system called Polyneural, with a visual network for exploring how things connect and fit together. My son was drawn to both. He kept asking to play them and would announce that he’d won, even though there weren’t any goals or anything to win.

Then he spotted a colorful expanding ball toy and said, “Daddy just made this on his computer.” To him, it was the same kind of thing he’d been playing with on the screen. He couldn’t understand why I couldn’t change the toy’s colors, too. He was finding something to play with in things I hadn’t thought of as games, so I brought both codebases into an early game and started giving him things to do and ways to win.

It grew from there. He’d find other things he wanted to play, sometimes things that weren’t games, sometimes apps where ads or paywalls kept getting in the way, and I’d work on making something for him. Those ideas became more games, and eventually Toucan Nexus. He plays them as I build them, helps me figure out what’s fun, and makes it pretty clear when something isn’t. It’s still taking shape, but that’s where it comes from: making things he wants to play and seeing where they go.