I wanted out of Unity
Unity and Unreal own game development now, and their tools are great right up until the business practices show up. Rebuilding PolyFish was me checking whether I could just leave.
Two companies basically own game development now. Unity and Unreal are everywhere, the default answer to “what do I build this in,” and honestly their tools are good. That is not the complaint. The complaint is that somewhere along the way the business practices started feeling more predatory than helpful, the kind of thing where you wake up to a new pricing model and a pit in your stomach. I got tired of building my little passion projects on top of someone else’s toll road.
So part of the reason I rebuilt PolyFish wasn’t PolyFish at all. It was a test. Could I take something real, something with physics and shaders and a whole living ecosystem, and stand it back up using just open web libraries instead of a big commercial engine? I genuinely didn’t know. That is exactly why I picked a project I already understood, so the only hard question was the engine one, not the “what am I even making” one.
Turns out, yeah. You can. What shipped is the whole thing running in a browser, scaling its performance to whatever device you are on, from a phone up to a headset, with no download and no install. You click a link and you are in the water.
As a player, that feels slick. No store page, no “download 4GB to continue,” just there. As the person who built it, it feels like something bigger than slick. It feels like freedom. I do not owe anybody a license check. I do not have to refresh the news to find out what my tools cost this quarter.
It is not flawless. There is an aliasing bug I let slip in near the end, and it nags me every single time I look at it. But here is the thing: it is mine to fix, on my own schedule, with nobody charging me for the privilege. Even the bugs feel different when they are actually yours.
Happy fourth of July, everybody.
all PolyFish updates