I wanted out of Unity
Unity and Unreal have gone completely dominant and one-size-fits-all. The tools are nice. It's the business practices I wanted out from under, so rebuilding PolyFish was me checking whether I could leave.
Unity and Unreal have become completely dominant and one-size-fits-all. Their tools are nice, that is not the complaint. The complaint is that their business practices have felt more predatory than productive for a while now, and I got tired of building my little passion projects on top of that.
So part of why I rebuilt PolyFish had nothing to do with PolyFish. I wanted to see whether there were libraries out there I could port it to instead. I picked a project I already understood on purpose, so the only hard question was the engine one and not the what-am-I-even-making one.
What shipped is a multi-platform app with scalable performance and no download or install required. It runs in a browser, on a phone, in a headset. You click a link and you are in the water.
As a player, that feels slick. As a dev, it feels like freedom.
It is not flawless. There is an aliasing bug that got introduced toward the end, where adding a feature in one place broke something in another. It was low enough priority that I didn’t want to fix it, and now every time I go back it sticks out like a sore thumb. It is on me to fix, on my own schedule, with nobody charging me for the privilege.
Happy fourth of July everyone.
all PolyFish updates