q5play v4.0 Released!
What can you do with 10x more sprites?
After 15 months in development, q5play v4.0 is here! 🥳
q5play is a beginner friendly, powerful, and cutting edge game engine for the web.
It’s the sequel to p5play v3: used to teach computer science and make real games!
q5play provides a more streamlined, polished experience and insanely optimized performance. It’s designed to be enjoyed by programmers of all skill levels.
What’s New in v4.0?
If you haven’t yet, check out my previous article that highlights important new features and the “What’s New in q5play?” wiki page.
To celebrate the release, I made a fun platformer level out of the name “q5play”.
Three coins at the beginning look impossible to reach… what’s the secret?
Play (or look at the code) to find out!
Want to learn how to make your own platformer with q5play? Check out the barebones platformer demo. It’s only 64 lines of code!
Animations
In q5play, it’s way easier to load sprite sheet animations.
Also, just as subgroups inherit sprite traits from their parent groups, now group.anis inherits animation traits from its parent group’s anis object. You can see a practical example of this in code for the “q5play” level.
Particles
Hot off the presses in the v4.0 release, is the new Visuals system!
Learn page: https://q5play.org/learn/animation.html?page=7
Take a Scrooge McDuck dive into this "coins splash" demo. Only 20 lines of code!
With a MacBook Air 2025 (Apple M4), q5play can render up to 200,000 animated coins in 4K at 60FPS!
Performance Comparison
On average hardware, p5play could only handle a few hundred sprites, but q5play can handle thousands of sprites in 4K at 60FPS.
q5play uses cutting edge tech that harnesses the power of modern computer hardware.
q5 WebGPU is, on average, 100x faster than p5.js. It offers similar and in some cases better performance compared to PixiJS.
Box2D v3 WASM provides significantly higher quality physics simulation and better performance compared to matter.js and Rapier.
What can you do with ~10x more sprites? 🤩
Join the Community
Join the q5play community on Discord to meet other people making games with q5play! 👾