Why we didn’t use Unity or Unreal.
It’s the first thing anyone sensible asks a three-person studio that wrote its own engine. Here’s the honest answer.
The short version
Unity and Unreal are remarkable, and most studios should use one of them. We’re not going to pretend otherwise.
But a headset gives you about eleven milliseconds to draw two pictures, and it never gives you more. When you need one of those milliseconds back, you have to be able to reach the place it’s hiding. We wanted to build that low, so we did.
Owning the engine means nothing sits between us and the hardware — and nobody else decides what our games are allowed to do.
What that buys you
One game, not two
The headset version and the monitor version aren’t separate builds trying to stay in step. They’re the same game. A faster machine simply gets to draw more.
Worlds from a single number
A whole building can be rebuilt from one number, identically, on every machine at once. Nobody waits on a download to stand in the same room as their friend.
Fixes arrive the same day
When something in the engine is wrong, we open the engine. No waiting on someone else’s release schedule, and no working around a bug for a year.
Nothing to take away
No licence terms, no per-install fees, no vendor changing the deal. What we built is ours, and it stays ours.
What it cost
Years. Everything a commercial engine hands you on day one — the editor, the asset pipeline, physics, audio — we had to build before we could use it. There’s no asset store to buy our way out of a problem, and no forum thread with our exact error in it.
We’d do it again. An engine you wrote is an engine you can explain, and one you can explain is one you can keep fixing. Nothing about our games is waiting on somebody else’s roadmap.
Footage
We’d rather show you than tell you. This is being cut now.