Celebrating 5 Years of p5play!

Let's reflect on what we've achieved with p5play. 🎉

Over the past 5 years, students have made incredible art installations, portfolio pieces, and full games with p5play! 🤩

Before we move on to q5play, I’d like to celebrate the remarkable achievements made by our community, which I’m so grateful for. ☺️

The true value of p5play wasn’t the code, but what y’all did with it! 💪

Thank You Teachers!

First, let’s give it up for the pioneering teachers that chose to teach p5play. They could’ve just taught the absolute basics. But instead, they enabled students to go beyond! 💫

When students learn how to use p5play, they aren’t doing glorified multiple choice tests to get green check marks or a certificate of course completion. They gain practical coding skills and more importantly, life skills from making and sharing projects with other students. 👾

When students make something with p5play, they own it. They can share it on their own websites; it isn’t stuck in some block based sandbox. 🏝️

All the p5play Game Jam winning projects over the years started out as a blank page. There were no step-by-step tutorials that they remixed with different pre-made assets. p5play just served as an outlet for their creative expression. 🎨

We’ve proved that teenagers can do way more than what most EdTech devs think they can! That’s awesome right? 😎

Student’s Achievements

Of course, this was something I eagerly hoped for when developing p5play, but the prodigious talent of these students, age 14-18, really blew me away. 🤯

Nirmay’s Red Remover, was one of the first full games made with p5play. It’s an HD remake/sequel to the charming Adobe Flash puzzle game of the same title, packed with tons of new levels. Blocks with animated faces react in funny ways as you try to remove just the red blocks. 🥹

Lachlan Noble’s Shenaniguns is a whacky online multiplayer top-down shooter that makes use of basically every feature p5play has to offer and then some. Maybe you played the demo back in Summer of 2024? Now the full game is available on Steam! 🔫

Farewell to p5play

I finally made my own game with p5play last summer, Traffic Simulator 2025. It was quite a grueling experience to try to get it done in a short time frame, but I’m happy with the result. 🏎️

I like to say that p5play is “beginner friendly” instead of saying it’s “easy”, because making games, regardless of the tool, takes a lot of work! Especially in this AI era, I want to continue to build this community around recognizing and celebrating all the effort that goes into making human art. 🥳

Also, I want to give a big shoutout to Girls Who Code for supporting p5play v3 from the start! 👩‍💻

p5play has been sunset as of v3.35, the “Gold Master” release. 🌅

But this isn’t goodbye! I’m looking forward to seeing what y’all can do with q5play. 🤝