Steam News31 March 20263mo ago

Code Tycoon moves to our own engine: PHPolygon

Code Tycoon is moving to our own engine When we started building Code Tycoon, we used VISU — an existing PHP-based rendering framework.

In this update3

Full notes

Full Code Tycoon update

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What changed

1 fix1 addition3 changes0 removals

Performance
UI and audio
Balance
Fixes

changedCode Tycoon is moving to our own engineWhen we started building Code Tycoon, we used VISU — an existing PHP-based rendering framework. It got us off the ground quickly and proved the concept: a full game, written in PHP, running natively on the desktop.

changedIntroducing PHPolygonPHPolygon is a PHP-native game engine we developed from the ground up. It's built around a single core idea: the entire stack — game logic, scenes, UI layouts, shaders — should be readable and writable by both humans and AI tools like Claude Code.

changedIntroducing PHPolygonOpenGL rendering — hardware-accelerated rendering via a clean PHP abstraction layer

addedWhat this means for Code TycoonThe port to PHPolygon is complete. The game runs on our own engine now. For you as a player, nothing changes — same game, same content. Under the hood, we now have full control over every layer of the stack.

fixedWhat this means for Code TycoonReported bugs will be addressed promptly.

Code Tycoon changes

changedWhen we started building Code Tycoon, we used VISU — an existing PHP-based rendering framework. It got us off the ground quickly and proved the concept: a full game, written in PHP, running natively on the desktop.

changedPHPolygon is a PHP-native game engine we developed from the ground up. It's built around a single core idea: the entire stack — game logic, scenes, UI layouts, shaders — should be readable and writable by both humans and AI tools like Claude Code.

changedOpenGL rendering — hardware-accelerated rendering via a clean PHP abstraction layer

addedThe port to PHPolygon is complete. The game runs on our own engine now. For you as a player, nothing changes — same game, same content. Under the hood, we now have full control over every layer of the stack.

fixedReported bugs will be addressed promptly.

Code Tycoon is moving to our own engine

When we started building Code Tycoon, we used VISU — an existing PHP-based rendering framework. It got us off the ground quickly and proved the concept: a full game, written in PHP, running natively on the desktop.

But as the project grew, we wanted more control. More control over the renderer, the scene format, and the entire authoring pipeline. So we built our own.

Introducing PHPolygon

PHPolygon is a PHP-native game engine we developed from the ground up. It's built around a single core idea: the entire stack — game logic, scenes, UI layouts, shaders — should be readable and writable by both humans and AI tools like Claude Code.

ECS architecture — Entity Component System with JSON scene format
OpenGL rendering — hardware-accelerated rendering via a clean PHP abstraction layer
AI-first authoring — no proprietary binary formats, no visual node graphs; everything is text

What this means for Code Tycoon

The port to PHPolygon is complete. The game runs on our own engine now. For you as a player, nothing changes — same game, same content. Under the hood, we now have full control over every layer of the stack.

Reported bugs will be addressed promptly.

What comes next

PHPolygon will power all our future projects: Software Architect, Code Rescue, and Netrunner: Uprising. All three are being built on PHPolygon from day one.

Thanks for playing Code Tycoon.

Source

Steam News / 31 March 2026

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