Grzegorz Otto · Mobile + web engineer · creator of Flare (cross-platform 2D engine)

Poland's national public broadcaster needed a single mobile app covering live radio (4 national + 17 regional stations), on-demand podcasts, offline downloads, and handoff to car head units and Chromecast. The previous stack was fragmented across platforms, and playback state drifted between the UI, lock screen, CarPlay/Android Auto and cast targets. The app had to keep playing reliably through network drops, app backgrounding, OS process death, and transitions between local audio, cast, and car surfaces — without the UI and the native media session ever disagreeing about what is playing.

Flare engine needed a production-grade showcase — one that exercises every layer, tells a coherent story, and is genuinely shippable. The genre (vertical shmup) is mechanically rich but small enough for a solo author. The setting (16th-century Polish folklore: Pan Twardowski, the Devil's bargain, exile to the Moon) is underused in games and culturally specific enough to stand out. The game also needed to answer a hard question for the engine: does Flare hold up across all 40 packages, including tier-2 platform services, IAP entitlements, i18n, a11y, and store-ready bundles?

Teams rebuild animation and interactive UI twice — once for web, once for mobile — and reach for heavy game engines or pre-baked tools (Lottie/Rive) that cannot express real dynamics. There was no single 2D engine that runs the same TypeScript on both targets, stays SEO-indexable and accessible, and still gives you physics, particles, and an ECS when you need them.