Big news for PlayCanvas developers: your games can now run inside Snapchat! 🎉 With Snapchat Web Lenses, you can build a game with PlayCanvas, upload it as a Lens and put it in front of a huge audience of Snapchatters who love to play.
In this post, we'll explain what Web Lenses are, show off four of the first PlayCanvas games on Snapchat and walk you through building and publishing your own.
Editor 2.35 is out, and it changes the first page you see. playcanvas.com/editor is now a projects home of its own, and the project management you used to do on the playcanvas.com projects page has moved into it: search, stars, forks, transfers, project settings, dev logs, teams, organizations and new projects.
The same page is also where an AI agent can now connect over MCP, before any project is open. From there it can list, create, rename and open your projects.
Editor 2.34 is out, two weeks after 2.32, and it is built around Engine 2.23. The headline is a new Inspector launch option: tick one box and your launched app comes up with a full debug panel docked beside it, where you can pause it, step it a frame at a time, pick entities straight out of the viewport and draw the physics world.
Alongside it: rigidbodies get a per-body Gravity Scale, Gaussian splats get a new Splat Budget Mode and their LOD distances back, particles can opt out of fog and tonemapping, and, from 2.33, you can throw away everything since your last checkpoint with Discard All.
Editor 2.32 is out, and it leads with something that has been a long time coming: the Joint component. Hinges, sliders, ball joints, springs and breakable welds are now things you configure in the inspector rather than assemble from a script.
There is more to it than that. Materials get ray-marched parallax occlusion, the render component gets per-cascade shadow control, text elements can finally justify, and the Gaussian splat LOD controls have been reworked.
This is also the first of what we intend to make a regular thing. Plenty has shipped in the Editor over the past year without ever being written up, so from here on we will be posting about Editor releases far more often — shorter posts, closer to the release, instead of waiting for one big enough to justify the effort.
Today we are unveiling our new PlayCanvas VSCode Extension!
The PlayCanvas VS Code Extension is a realtime editing environment for text-based assets from the PlayCanvas Editor platform.
The PlayCanvas VS Code Extension is open-sourced under an MIT license on GitHub
Today, we are thrilled to announce the open sourcing of the PlayCanvas Editor Frontend!
The PlayCanvas Editor is a powerful visual editing environment for building WebGL, WebGPU, and WebXR applications. It has been the cornerstone of countless incredible projects, many of which you can explore on the PlayCanvas website. While the PlayCanvas Engine has always been open source, the Editor Frontend, a key component of the PlayCanvas ecosystem, has not. That changes today!
The PlayCanvas Editor Frontend is open-sourced under an MIT license on GitHub
We’re excited to announce a major step forward for PlayCanvas: ESM Scripts are now supported — and officially the recommended way to write scripts in your PlayCanvas projects.
Back in 2016, we introduced what we now call Classic Scripts. At the time, this represented the state of the art in JavaScript. But things have evolved rapidly since then, and developers today expect modern tooling, clearer patterns, and better integration with the broader JavaScript ecosystem.
If you’ve ever struggled with managing classic scripts, wondered why your auto-complete didn’t work, or wished you could reuse code across projects more easily — this is for you.
ESM (ECMAScript Modules) brings modern JavaScript development to the heart of PlayCanvas. It’s faster to get started, easier to scale your project, and way more fun to work with. No more hidden globals. No more messy script loading order. Just well-structured, maintainable, and modular code — exactly how modern web development should be.
It's here! 🥳 Today, we're excited to announce that WebGPU support has officially arrived in the PlayCanvas Editor.
Today we're excited to announce that PlayCanvas now supports WebP and AVIF images natively in the editor. Two new, efficient image formats built for the web.
This is not just an exciting update for us but a game-changer for anyone looking to optimize their projects for faster load times and better quality.
Today, we're excited to announce the integration of Sketchfab into the PlayCanvas Editor!
"Spartan Armour" by McCarthy3D is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
With today's launch you'll have instant access to Sketchfab's enormous library of high quality 3D content right inside the Editor.