Questions & answers.

Flare is a modular 2D engine written in TypeScript that runs the same code on the web (via CanvasKit WASM) and React Native (via Shopify’s react-native-skia). It targets high-performance animation, gamification, and interactive UI across web and mobile from a single, SEO- and accessibility-friendly codebase, and it open-sources at its October 2026 launch. Games like Pan Tvardowski, a Polish-folklore vertical shmup, are dogfooding showcases built on top of it, not the product itself.

Not primarily. Flare is a cross-platform 2D animation, gamification, and interactive-UI engine; games are simply the most demanding way to prove it out. The core use cases are canvas-driven UX, animated dashboards, gesture-rich onboarding, gamified loops, and fast React Native prototyping. It isn’t a general-purpose game engine and isn’t positioned as one.

Flare is built solo by Grzegorz Otto, using AI-directed agent infrastructure to cover a broad surface as one person. It’s a single-maintainer project that’s honest about being early.

Three: iOS (App Store), Android (Google Play), and the web (browser, via CanvasKit WASM). The design goal is one TypeScript codebase that runs on all three, sharing a single Skia rendering path (react-native-skia on mobile, CanvasKit on the web).

It ships as 40 scoped @flare-engine/* packages in a strict, downward-only layered monorepo — a 7-layer dependency graph with no cycles (enforced in CI). That layering isolates concerns into focused, independently consumable packages, so you can pull in only what you need.

Yes. In an off-device microbenchmark (Bun), the ECS stepped 1,000 entities in 23.7 µs/frame, roughly 24 ns per entity, scaling linearly. Treat that as an isolated CPU measurement of the ECS step, not an on-device frame time: it shows the data layer scales cleanly, but it doesn’t predict real render performance on a device.

By design, the Skia Atlas sprite path targets 500–2,000 sprites at 60fps on a mid-range reference device (Samsung Galaxy A54 5G, release build); that is a design estimate, not a device measurement. Actual on-device runs so far: a p95 worst-cell frame time of 9.52 ms against the 16.67 ms / 60fps budget (Pixel 10, particle-storm), and a heavy full-game scene at roughly 48fps on the A54 (that cliff is physics-bound, not render-bound). These are Android numbers; iOS is untested so far, and there are no measured web numbers yet.

The same rendering code runs on both: react-native-skia on mobile, CanvasKit (WebGL) on the web. The web renderer is live today — the three animations on the flareengine.dev homepage run the engine’s real packages (ECS, particles, animation, math) and its @flare-engine/postfx SkSL shaders in your browser via CanvasKit, not video. The web renderer and physics they use are local precursors of the forthcoming @flare-engine/render-web and @flare-engine/simulation packages. Every Skia feature the engine uses on native has a CanvasKit counterpart, so API-level parity is complete. Honest caveats: web performance is still unmeasured (no web fps numbers yet), the full CanvasKit runtime is a ~8 MB WASM download (loaded only when you start an animation), and CanvasKit isn’t a fastest-web-renderer play — the value is one codebase across platforms.

Most animation libraries are web-only or DOM-bound, and most 2D frameworks target a single runtime. Flare’s difference is that one TypeScript codebase drives iOS, Android, and the web off a shared Skia core, and it stays SEO- and accessibility-friendly rather than trapping everything in an opaque canvas. On React Native specifically, the closest legacy comparator, react-native-game-engine, sees roughly 1,600 downloads a week and has been dormant for about six years, so a maintained cross-platform core is the gap Flare aims at.

Yes. Flare targets React Native and renders through react-native-skia, so it runs in a standard React Native or Expo app — the showcase game Pan Tvardowski is built with Expo. Because it relies on native modules (Skia), you use a custom dev client or an Expo prebuild rather than Expo Go.

Not publicly yet. All 40 @flare-engine/* packages are published at 0.2.1 with access: restricted — a real publish, but a restricted scoped package returns a 404 to anonymous installs, so npm install will not work for you today. Join the notify-me list on this site to hear when public packages land.

Flare open-sources at its public launch, targeted for October 2026, under the Apache-2.0 license (an explicit patent grant plus a trademark reservation for the Flare Engine name). The packages are published restricted at 0.2.1 today and flip to public at launch. The showcase game Pan Tvardowski is covered by a separate, non-commercial license.

Yes. The flareengine.dev homepage hero is a live, interactive demo of the engine’s own web renderer: three animations (Physarum, Spacetime, Reactions) rendered in your browser via CanvasKit, driven by the engine’s real ECS, particle, animation and post-FX packages — not video (the physics is a local precursor of @flare-engine/simulation). Pick one from the top-right, drag to move the camera, or toggle immersive mode. It loads the CanvasKit runtime on demand when you start an animation.

The near-term milestone is the public launch (public npm plus open source), targeted for October 2026, when the source repo opens, GitHub links go live, and a community Discord opens. The restricted publish already landed (now at 0.2.1). Contribution isn’t open yet — today it’s a single-maintainer project with no public community. Watch the roadmap and join the notify-me list for when installation, source, and contribution guidelines open up.

It’s early and honest about it: version 0.2.1, one maintainer, no public community yet. But it’s heavily tested — the engine suite runs 2,288 passing tests across 196 files (about 32,000 assertions), and the flagship showcase game, Pan Tvardowski, adds 2,048 passing tests of its own across 266 files. It isn’t on the app stores yet, so “the engine ships games” stays aspirational until Pan Tvardowski is live. You can see an early build in action in this write-up: archetype ECS in TypeScript.

There is a docs site at /getting-started — a getting-started guide, concept docs, showcase guides that rebuild the homepage hero animations step by step, and a live catalog of the 40 @flare-engine/* packages. A full per-symbol API reference goes live with the public npm packages at the October 2026 launch.