3D + 2D: Testing out my cross-platform WASM graphics engine

> If you think of how Unity made it easy for devs to build cross-platform games, the idea is to do the same thing for all visual applications.

But why wouldn't I "just" use Unity?

I agree with you. Nobody cares about the platform specific details anymore, and people are willing to pay a little bit of money for an end-all-be-all middleware. I have gone my whole life not paying attention to a single Apple-specific API, and every single time, someone has written a better, more robust, cross-platform abstraction.

But Unity is already this middleware. I already can make a whole art application on top of Unity (or Unreal). People do. Sometimes people build whole platforms on top of Unity and are successful (Niantic) and some are not (Improbable). You're one guy. You are promising creating a whole game engine - you're going to get hung up on not using the word game engine, but that is intellectually honest, it is a game engine - which a lot of people 1,000x better capitalized than you have promised, and those people have been unable to reach parity with Unity after years of product development. So while I want you to succeed, I feel like a lot of Y Combinator guys have this, "We make no mistakes, especially we do not make strategic mistakes." It's going to be a long 3 years!

Unity is so much larger and more complex than a graphics middleware.

It comes with physics engines, telemetry, networking, a c# runtime and probably even more.

I don’t think that any of the adobe suite would ever be built in unity bc why do they need to ship a physics engine with their photo editor.

Not to mention that unity is backed by an, imo, untrustworthy company who’s obviously willing to change pricing structure on a dime and retroactively.

Without going into the motivations for building a startup and doing Y Combinator, I do agree with many of your points.

People can use Unity to build games and non-games. I personally don't think it fits a lot of different use-cases or application models and that it tends to be most successful in specific gaming verticals, but if it works well for you, by all means use it!

I'm strategically betting both on the lines between what is viewed as a game and not blurring, as well as developers needing a friendlier, more flexible way of building this kind of interactive content. I'm by no means under the illusion that strategic mistakes won't be made, or that this won't be a 10-year+ journey - realistically many (most?) successful companies have a very nonlinear path, including Unity themselves.

I agree, I think "game engine" is a misnomer for what are better termed "game (dev) studio", like Unity. They include a sophisticated game engine but also a lot of supporting tools and GUIs.

> ever be built in unity bc why do they need to ship a physics engine with their photo editor.

I know you narrowly mean "rigidbody physics for the purpose of videogames." But Adobe did ship a physics engine with their photo editor! They discontinued their "3D" support, and raytracing is most definitely physics with a capital P, but they were shipping it for a long time. If you have an even more normal definition of physics, to include optical physics, well they have a CV solution for many features like camera RAW processing, removing distortion, etc.

> It comes with physics engines, telemetry, networking, a c# runtime and probably even more.

Because that is what people need to make multimedia applications.

I agree Unreal and Unity are not appropriate but I do wonder about Godot. Its early enough where it doesn't have the strong connotations of being a game engine yet. I've seen some cool applications made in it too (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kKp0oguzr8). So I wonder if you could apply your energy to making it more cross platform using WASM (if that's even necessary) and extend it with your own UI language instead of rolling your own?

I think Godot is the closest thing to this today, and I agree, would love to work with them! Particularly on the Wasm and packaging side of things.

There absolutely is a need for a robust cross-platform rendering/multimedia solution, more in a similar vein to SDL than Unity or Unreal. The offering of Unity, Unreal, and perhaps Godot is just abysmal when considering that for all of the man hours put into the game development space, that is basically all we got. There should be hundreds of viable cross platform game engines catering to a wide variety niches that continually stretch the bounds of what a game actually is and how it can be represented. Game libraries such as Monogame, Heaps, Raylib, Love2D, etc just wouldn't be that popular if Unity and Unreal are the be all and end all. Adobe Air was once a popular choice (a very large number of top 50 app store games were built with Adobe Air) and I'd wager still would be if it didn't collapse under its technical weight.

Currently it is the low level, cross platform layer that is the most complex and the biggest hurdle towards making a game engine viable. If it wasn't so insanely complex, and the technical barrier towards making your own engine is reduced, the tired cliche of "don't build an engine" wouldn't hold as much weight, and it opens the doors to building a bespoke, fit for purpose engine for every game you create. Don't underestimate what an individual or small teams can produce if they are operating on a solid platform that facilitates a rich ecosystem of tools.

> Currently it is the low level, cross platform layer that is the most complex and the biggest hurdle towards making a game engine viable

I couldn't agree more. My goal is not to simply build "a better game engine", but to make this kind of low-level tech accessible at a higher level and with much better dev tools to a broader class of developers and applications

> Don't underestimate what an individual or small teams can produce if they are operating on a solid platform

This gets into my motivations for building a company - larger companies have the resources to build moats, but often can't quickly realign themselves to go after novel technical opportunities. It's not either / or - both models exist for very valid reasons.

I am glad people are working on it!!

Have you seen Kha by any chance? It has similar goals. I find it quite awesome, but it won't gain mass adoption for a bunch of reasons. https://github.com/Kode/Kha

Someone built an immediate mode renderer on top https://github.com/armory3d/zui, which is utilised by ArmorPaint https://armorpaint.org. I also use Zui for my own bespoke 2D game engine.

I find this tech and tooling really quite amazing (just look at how little source code Zui has) given just how small the ecosystem around it is. I think Kha really illustrates what can be achievable if the lower levels have robust but simple APIs, just exposing the bare minimum as a standard for others to build upon. It really suggest taking a look at the graphics2 (2d canvas like) api.

For the kind of project I work on (mostly 2d games), I think it would really awesome if your framework also supported low level audio, and a variety of inputs such as keyboard, mice, and gamepads. If it also had decent text rendering support it would basically be my dream library/framework.

Interesting! Had never heard of it before, will check it out. The point of Haxe seems to be as a meta-compiler to generate code for a bunch of different languages/compilers? The same spirit of the Wasm dev experience but without the runtime.

Text / fonts is very much on the roadmap! For input and audio I would have to think through the scope.

> The point of Haxe seems to be as a meta-compiler to generate code for a bunch of different languages/compilers?

That's basically correct, although there is also a cross platform runtime called Hashlink but is unsupported by Kha.

https://hashlink.haxe.org/

> Game libraries such as Monogame, Heaps, Raylib, Love2D, etc just wouldn't be that popular if Unity and Unreal are the be all and end all.

Just because it happens, doesn't mean it makes sense.

Anyway, people write their own game engines, and programming languages for game engines, because it is intellectually stimulating to do so, and something you spend 100h/wk to yield 1h of gameplay is still giving you more gameplay than something boring you spend 0h/wk on.

Then, the people who use those engines you are naming, they end up porting to Unity anyway. If you want to deploy on iOS and Switch with one codebase, it is the only game in town. And that's sometimes 60% of revenue.

> Don't underestimate what an individual or small teams can produce if they are operating on a solid platform that facilitates a rich ecosystem of tools.

Unity fits this bill exactly. I too want more competition. But in the real world I live in, if someone were to ask me, "what solid platform should I choose to make my multimedia application, as a small team, that also has a rich ecosystem of tools, and will enable me to make pretty much anything I can think of?" I would say, use Unity. Because I want them to succeed.

Two high profile examples, Celeste and Deadcells use Monogame and Heaps (Haxe). They weren’t ported to Unity. Celeste and Towerfall Ascension are two examples of very high quality games that bucked the trend and just used a low level renderer (Monogame). IMO they are better because of that.

But besides that point, the very reason why many games are ported from their niche library to Unity or Unreal is mostly just for cross platform support. Not because the game creator has a preference for Unity or Unreal. They are forced into it through lack of choice if they want cross platform. If Love2D, Phaser, Flixel, and any other niche 2D game library had an easy way to target consoles they would get a whole lot more use, but they don’t because the lower levels are extremely complex and engine/framework/library developers can’t support it. WebGPU appears to offer a path forward in that regard.

> the very reason why many games are ported from their niche library to Unity or Unreal is mostly just for cross platform support.

Indeed.

> They are forced into it through lack of choice if they want cross platform... because the lower levels are extremely complex

That is what I am saying. There are countless indie game engines of great repute, but because they are "1 guy," they cannot reach feature parity with Unity. They never will.

The Blizzard that developed the Overwatch engine had immense experience and a notoriously frugal (in terms of employee pay) culture. It still cost them about $100m and many years to develop a great engine for 3 platforms (Windows/Xbox, Switch, PS5). What hope does Godot have with $8m, or MonoGame with kopeks?

Nobody can vibes their way past the math problem of multi-platform game engines.

This is only controversial because Unity received so much ill will; and, that the indie games business and social media are very sensitive to vibes.

> WebGPU appears to offer a path forward in that regard [like supporting the Nintendo Switch].

While I would love for this to be true, it is significantly more aspirational than saying that because of Game Porting Toolkit, DirectX offers "a path forward" on macOS.