The Creative Coding Magazine
p5.js, Three.js, WebGPU, shaders, and the libraries and projects pushing generative and procedural work forward.
MesoCraft is a browser-based, node-based procedural modeling tool for building and exploring mesoscale biological structures, pairing rule-based generation with guided animation for scientific communication.
GameMaker is making GMRT, its next-generation runtime, free to publish with. The old terms asked for a Professional licence to sell a GMRT game, and source access sat in Enterprise alone. Both change on New Year's Day — and the company's own pricing page has not caught up yet.
GSS (GPU Style Sheets) is a language where you declare shapes in an @scene block and style them with CSS selectors, and the compiler emits a single raymarched shader for WebGPU or WebGL2. It reached v0.0.6 on 9 October with a playground, a VS Code extension and a <gss-scene> tag. The interesting claim is not the syntax — it is that the cascade is a reasonable way to describe a scene graph.
A compute shader runs arbitrary parallel work on the GPU with no triangles involved. This walks the minimum viable WebGPU compute pipeline end to end — adapter, device, storage buffer, bind group layout, workgroup sizing, dispatch, staging-buffer readback — and explains why your first attempt returns an empty array.
web-ocean renders a sunset sea with no engine and no rendering library. The README is an unusually complete account of how a modern ocean is actually built: JONSWAP spectrum, Donelan-Banner spreading, radix-2 inverse FFTs in workgroup memory, whitecaps keyed to the surface Jacobian. 611 stars in two days, MIT, and 6 to 8 ms a frame at 1440p.
BRUTAL is the framework RocketWerkz built Kitten Space Agency on and Ludeon built RimWorld's Waylith engine on. It went public three days ago and already has 1,700 stars. What makes it unusual is not what it includes — it is the list of things its maintainers say they will never add.
Everyone expected the platform response to AI-assisted decompilation to be defensive. Instead the first one on record is a small group chartered to build on it, from a company that in the same message reaffirms being a 'responsible steward of IP'. Both things are in there, and the tension is the point.
Hand-decompiling a single game took communities years. Models now do a rough job in days, and the output compiles and runs. Here are the actual projects, what the technique does and does not produce, and why the preservation win and the licensing problem are the same event.
p5.strands arrived in p5.js 2.0 and has been stabilising since. It is the shortest path from a p5 sketch to GPU-speed graphics, and the mental model it asks for is different from GLSL in a way worth understanding before you start.
A DevOps architect spent ten months learning Z80 assembly to build the kind of Amiga crack intro he failed to recreate as a teenager — on the lesser machine. The techniques are the interesting part, and the honesty about the frustration is the rest.
According to Bloomberg, Epic has delayed an unannounced Disney shooter and instructed the team to adopt an AI-first production model covering code and artwork, with one director telling developers "No more hand-written code." Tim Sweeney publicly confirmed a company-wide retooling. The context is March's layoff of more than 1,000 people.
Synth Anatomy's editor has published a long piece on what AI-generated plugins are doing to the music software market and to the job of covering it. It is the most honest account yet of a problem every outlet in this field now has, and it names the open-source licensing question directly.
Halfspace is an experimental IDE for solid modeling with distance fields, built as a GUI over Keeter's Fidget geometry kernel. Models come from predefined primitives and hand-written scripts, export as images or triangle meshes, and there is a browser demo for desktops with WebGPU. Open source under MPLv2, worked on since April 2025, and explicitly not vibe-coded.
Pardall Games is a solo-built interactive archive of assets from PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn games. Models, levels, effects, sprites, textures and animations, converted for the browser, with a 3D viewer and a comparison arena. Free, non-commercial, and deliberately view-only — nothing can be downloaded.
Cinnamon is an open-source reimplementation of the GameMaker: Studio runner in C, targeting the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. Because GameMaker games compile to bytecode rather than machine code, one runner unlocks the whole catalogue — Undertale, Deltarune, Undertale Yellow and the SAGE 2019 Pizza Tower demo among them. 409 stars, MPL-2.0, and explicitly written without AI.
Giuseppe Recupero — Jae — has published a browser WebGL experiment in which a cloth simulation controls the surface of a ray-marched refractive cube, with dispersion and soft-body physics, all running in real time. It sits inside a small shift worth noting: FragCoord as an alternative to Shadertoy, and XorDev releasing more than seventy of his shader write-ups publicly.
"Juice" is the game-design term for rich interaction-contingent feedback: the squash, the particles, the sound, the screen shake that make a click feel consequential. JuicyVIS translates it into visualisation and finds that juicy feedback does raise engagement and aesthetic satisfaction — but that timing beats intensity.
Lighting a 3D scene means placing and tuning light objects. This plug-in lets a lighting artist paint the result directly, with 2D drawing tools, and keep it editable. Early access is planned. The reason this matters is that it hands lighting back to people who think in images rather than in inverse-square falloff.
Recursive trees are the first generative thing most people code and the point where many stop. This covers the actual grammar of an L-system, why real plants need stochastic and context-sensitive rules, how the space-colonization algorithm differs, and when each one is the right tool.
A 3D-printed free-form lampshade has an uneven glow, because the thickness varies and the bulb is wherever you put it. This method jointly optimises the cavity geometry and the light positions by differentiable rendering for uniform luminance — then validates it by printing five of them.
A 2001 Xbox game running at 94fps in a browser is not emulation. It is the end of a decompilation chain in which volunteers recovered the original source structure, which then gets recompiled for any target including WebAssembly. The distinction matters, and the preservation argument is the real story.
Vector rasterisation and differentiable vector graphics have been separate problems with separate tools. Windfoil unifies them by solving coverage exactly rather than approximating it, runs in WebGPU, and scales a differentiable optimiser to tens of thousands of shapes at interactive rates.
You play Anon, inside a dead laptop, trying to find the Wi-Fi password and reconnect with the friends you used to have. You can turn into a marble and magnetise to surfaces. The aesthetic references — PS1, Frutiger Aero, home video — are specific enough to be a thesis rather than a mood board.
Most kinetic typography either hand-animates or lets an optimiser deform an outline freely, which produces tearing and jitter. This method restricts the motion to the letter's own physical vibration modes, derived from its geometry. The result loops seamlessly and stays legible, and the trick generalises well beyond type.
The usual way to get video out of one application and into another involves a capture device, an encoder, or a screen grab — all of which cost latency and quality. Spout on Windows and Syphon on macOS pass a GPU texture between processes with no copy to the CPU at all. Here is how to use them and where they break.
Vega-Lite and its relatives were designed around what is easy for a person to write. A study posted October 1 asks what happens when the author is a model instead, evaluates ten JSON visualization DSLs, and finds four failure patterns tied to particular design choices. If you build a DSL or an API, this is a short list worth reading.
If you work with 360° video, environment maps, ambisonic audio or anything else that lives on a sphere, you have almost certainly done something mathematically wrong by treating it as a flat rectangle. torch-harmonics is an open, differentiable library that handles the sphere properly, and the paper landed September 30.
The Super FX was a 3D coprocessor that lived on the cartridge, not in the console. Tobi has used it to run a version of Super Mario 64 on a Super Nintendo with a purpose-written engine, reusing the original assets. Frames draw back to front because there is no Z-culling, and levels may need cutting to fit in 2MB.
Pure Data is Miller Puckette's free, open-source visual programming environment for audio — the same lineage as Max/MSP, and the thing embedded inside more games and apps than you would guess. This gets you from download to a working synth patch, explains the one rule about tilde objects that trips up everyone, and points at where to go next.
A new Godot addon adds perspective-warped 2D nodes: place a sprite across four custom corner points, blend between shapes, and build pseudo-3D carousels. It needs Godot 4.6 and it is on the Asset Store. The technique is ancient, which is exactly why having it as a node is useful.
A primer on Amiga screens circulated via Adafruit, and it's worth creative coders' attention. The Amiga's display wasn't a buffer you filled with pixels — it was a set of hardware registers that a dedicated coprocessor could rewrite scanline by scanline, which is why its graphics look the way they do and why they're hard to reproduce.
Scanning a space that changes between visits breaks reconstruction. ChronoFuseGS, posted September 25, merges separately trained Gaussian Splatting models from different timesteps into one, letting Gaussians from one capture refine persistent geometry in the others. It encodes per-primitive persistence and supports adding new timesteps without rebuilding.
A project breakdown published on 80 Level walks through creating a futuristic hovercraft flight simulator inspired by The Matrix. The technically interesting part isn't the aesthetic — it's that a hovering vehicle has none of the passive stability an aircraft gets from moving forward, so the control feel has to be constructed deliberately.
p5.js v2.3.4, released September 25, is a bugfix patch. The notable fix: `p5.VERSION` was broken during the previous patch release and is corrected here. Also restored is a more helpful error message when preload() is used, plus missing TypeScript declarations. Work continues in main toward 2.4.
Implicit neural representations of surfaces force a three-way trade between training efficiency, rendering speed and noise robustness. M-plicits, posted September 23, models a surface as a residual sum of MLPs trained on a sequence of nested neighbourhoods, localising supervision to narrow bands around previous zero-level sets — which makes the coarse network act as a low-pass filter on noisy input.
PixiJS v8.21.0, released September 17, fixes Matrix.decompose() to turn a mirrored matrix into a real rotation with negative scale rather than a zero rotation with nonzero skew. Nothing renders differently; anything reading decomposed values does. It also adds TypeScript 6 and 7 support.
Prompted by an Art Blocks discussion in early September, Right Click Save ran a piece by Piter Pasma on how generative artists can distinguish hand-coded work from AI-generated output. The honest version of the argument isn't about authenticity badges — it's about what a deterministic algorithm can promise that a model can't.
deck.gl v9.4, released September 5, completes the port of its entire official layer catalogue to WebGPU with render parity against the WebGL versions — including MVTLayer tile clipping and Tile3DLayer point clouds. The project still labels WebGPU support experimental and not recommended for production.
ArmorPaint 1.0 shipped on September 4 after eight years in early access, rebuilt entirely in C with its own 3D engine, 2D drawing system, and UI. It brings Direct3D 12, Vulkan, Metal and WebGPU backends, basic sculpting and UV editing, timeline playback for skinned characters, and on-device generative nodes for photo-to-material and upscaling.
eenk is an open-source firmware and companion editor that lets writers author branching interactive fiction in inkle's ink scripting language and play it back on Xteink, a family of cheap ESP32-powered e-ink readers — turning a budget hackable gadget into a dedicated text-adventure console.
Every browser-based shader tool covered here — Shaders v3, Paper Shaders, ShaderVine — is built on WGSL. The language underneath all of them just moved a real step closer to being permanently locked in.
Not every shader-tool release is about new effects. This one's about the pipeline not silently corrupting memory while you're building them.
Unity's pitch for its next major version isn't new features so much as removing the two things that make iteration painful: slow shader compiles and a migration everyone dreads.
A hand-curated shader library that used to be a paid product is now free, commercial-use-included, and framework-agnostic. That changes the calculus for anyone who was reaching for Figma's generative shaders instead.
Getting an audio model running locally usually means a Python environment, a CUDA version argument, and an afternoon. A single C++ binary that loads a GGUF file is a different proposition — and downloads jumped 42% overnight.
TouchDesigner artists have lived with unmergeable binary project files for years. Embody turns networks into diffable text and lets an AI agent build them through 60 exposed tools.
Shipping web shaders used to mean writing raw WGSL and fighting bundle size. Shaders v3's TypeGPU-based engine compiles up to 25x faster and ships 3x smaller — while adding a proper visual editor on top.
Vector animation for the web has meant After Effects plus an exporter plus a handoff. Lottie Creator 2.0 collapses that into a browser tab — and adds no-code interactivity that a static Lottie file never had.
cables.gl let anyone patch together real-time WebGL visuals in a browser. Now it runs offline and is fully open source under MIT — a meaningful shift for a creative-coding tool that had always been tethered to the cloud.
TouchDesigner is node-based, powerful, and notoriously hard to version-control. Embody plugs it into an AI agent you can just talk to — and adds an open, diffable file format the community has wanted for years.
For most beginners, p5.js *is* the p5.js Web Editor. As of July, that editor defaults to 2.x — quietly handing millions of learners a WebGPU renderer and a modern toolchain, while 1.x keeps working.
SIGGRAPH's technical papers get the citations, but the Experience Hall is where the conference's real-time and interactive research becomes something you can actually walk up and try. This year's lineup includes robot dogs running evolving language models.
SOPs have run on the CPU since TouchDesigner existed. POPs are the first real answer to what that's been costing generative geometry work.