Grzegorz Otto · Senior React Native engineer · mobile + web

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 36 packages, including tier-2 platform services, IAP entitlements, i18n, a11y, and store-ready bundles?

React Native has no real 2D game engine. `react-native-game-engine` is dead (last published 6 years ago, ~2 235 downloads/week) and renders through RN Views; Phaser/Pixi/Excalibur don't run on RN at all. Sprite sheets, tilemaps, particles, game audio, ECS — none exist as published RN libraries. Teams roll the stack from scratch every time.