TERMS / POIESIA

Poiesia terms of use.

Effective July 16, 2026

The plain version

Poiesia is a free game engine. No subscription, no royalties, no restrictions on what you ship with it. Build and sell whatever you want. The engine itself is proprietary freeware — you can use it freely, you just can't redistribute it. For site-wide terms, see jjrhymes.com terms.

P1What Poiesia is

Poiesia is a game engine built with C++20, Vulkan, and OpenGL. Entity-component system architecture, rigid body physics, spatial audio, asset pipeline, and a visual scene editor. It is free — no subscription, no royalties, no per-seat licensing. Proprietary freeware published by JJ Rhymes, Lafayette, Louisiana, USA.

P2License grant

Poiesia is licensed to you free of charge with the following grant:

Use: You may use Poiesia to develop games and interactive applications for personal or commercial purposes.
No royalties: You owe nothing on games or products you ship with Poiesia, regardless of revenue.
No subscription: Poiesia is free now and stays free. No trial period, no feature gating, no payment required.
No redistribution of the engine: You may not redistribute, sublicense, or resell the Poiesia engine, editor, or tools as a standalone product. You may not present a fork or derivative as the official Poiesia or as made by JJ Rhymes.

In short: build and sell whatever you want with it. Don't redistribute it as a product.

P3Your games and content

You own everything you create with Poiesia — your games, your assets, your builds, your source code. You have full commercial rights to anything you ship. No revenue sharing, no royalty reports, no approval process.

P4Engine assets and tools

Built-in editor tools, example assets, and template projects are provided for use within Poiesia projects. You may include engine-provided assets in your shipped games. You may not extract and redistribute them as standalone asset packs.

P5Third-party libraries

Poiesia uses open-source libraries including GLFW, GLM, ImGui, EnTT, and others. These are distributed under their respective open-source licenses, which apply to those components. When you ship a game built with Poiesia, you are responsible for complying with the license terms of any bundled third-party libraries (most require only attribution in your credits or documentation).

P6Support

Poiesia is a free product. Support is best-effort with no guaranteed response time or SLA. I may provide documentation, community resources, and updates, but none of these are guaranteed or contractual obligations.

P7Acceptable use

You agree not to:

Reverse engineer the engine for the purpose of creating a competing product
Misrepresent the engine as your own work or claim endorsement by JJ Rhymes
Use the engine for any unlawful purpose
Remove or alter proprietary notices or branding within the engine itself

P8Disclaimer of warranties

Poiesia is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind. Game performance, rendering quality, and stability depend on your code, your assets, and your target hardware. I disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

P9Limitation of liability

Poiesia is free software. To the fullest extent permitted by law, I will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages. My total aggregate liability for all claims is capped at US $10.

P10Governing law

Laws of the State of Louisiana, USA. Courts in Lafayette Parish, Louisiana.

P11Contact

Questions: booking@jjrhymes.com.