out now
PolyFish
A whole underwater ecosystem running in your browser. Everything in it eats, poops and reproduces, and the poop is where the plants come from.
How it's made
- Beer and zombies
PolyFish looks like a peaceful little ocean. It started as beer yeast that behaved unnervingly like the zombies from a game I'd worked on.
- I couldn't describe what was wrong
The underwater light was the most frustrating part of PolyFish. I didn't know how to program it, and I didn't have a good way of communicating what was wrong.
- 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.
- 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.
- Everybody poops
The whole PolyFish food web runs on one humble mechanic. The first thing that happens in the sim, before a single fish, is a piece of poop falling out of the sky.