Little Workshop's WebGL marble game showing an isometric 3D view with a reflective sphere rolling on colorful geometric platforms, bounce pads, and glowing white milestone markers against a gradient background
Little Workshop, a Paris-based creative studio, built this slick Marble Madness throwback for Netlify to celebrate hitting 5 million developers. You're basically rolling a ball through a playful 3D timeline of Netlify's milestones, with each of the five levels introducing different mechanics like bounce pads, elevators, and those magnetic white dots that pull you into company factoids (which plenty of players admitted to speed-running around). The isometric view and bouncy physics nail that arcade feel, and it runs butter-smooth on both desktop and mobile. The studio won FWA Site of the Day for it, which tracks.
The tech stack is pretty solid. They built it on Three.js with a custom render pipeline, leaning on Rapier (the Rust physics engine via WASM) for all that satisfying marble momentum and friction. What's clever is they designed levels in Unity, ran them through a Blender pipeline for optimization, then loaded them as GLTF in the browser. The 2D UI overlays use CSS 3D transforms to stay locked to the WebGL view, and they even used the Keyboard API's getLayoutMap() method so AZERTY and other layouts just work. Two devs knocked this out in about 8 weeks, which is wild given how polished it feels.
Check out Little Workshop's full breakdown, and if you want to see what else they've built, their portfolio has some seriously impressive WebGL work (they also made Mozilla BrowserQuest way back in 2010). You can find them on Twitter/X and LinkedIn.
- Live Demo: https://5-million-devs.netlify.com/
- Case Study: https://www.littleworkshop.fr/projects/5milliondevs/
- Author: Little Workshop