I rebuilt it for my dad's birthday
My dad recorded the narration for PolyFish back in 2014, and then almost nobody got to hear it. For his birthday I rebuilt the whole thing to run from a link.
The thing I love most in PolyFish is the voice.
When I first built it, back in 2014, I was a new dad and we had just moved to Texas to be closer to the grandparents. My dad has been a radio pro his whole career, everything from morning shows to award-winning character work in ads. PolyFish turned into a fun chance for us to collaborate.
I wrote a cheesy script, and he gave a cheesy sweet delivery. Nature-documentary narration, played dead straight, for a tank of low-poly fish that had not earned that kind of gravity at all.
I showed it on a headset at a VR meetup in Austin and people stopped and watched. But this was all before consumer headsets were available. No matter how well it demoed at shows, there was no way for anybody to play it at home. So it went in a drawer with his voice on it, and it sat there from 2014 until this year.
What pulled it back out was his birthday coming up. It seemed like a good excuse to remind him of that time we played in VR a dozen years ago, except this time I could put it out so it plays in a browser, on a phone, and in a headset. Part of it was also that I was playing with AI tools and wanted something more familiar than building an app from scratch again.
Now I can send him a link and he can open the thing we made together, on his phone, and hear himself narrating a sea full of fish.
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