SWOOOP drops you into a biplane circling a floating island. One button. Collect gems, dodge clouds, don't crash. The low-poly geometry looks like someone built it from paper and cardboard, but the ambient occlusion keeps it from feeling flat. Particle trails follow your wings. The physics feel right.

This was one of the early demos that put PlayCanvas on the map. Vaios Kalpias-Ilias programmed it from Athens while Kevin Rooney handled the art from London. Four weeks, two people, cloud-hosted tooling. They shipped it in March 2014 as proof that WebGL could deliver polished browser games without the usual headaches. A few months later, PlayCanvas open sourced the engine under MIT license. Over 2.3 million people have flown the loop since then.

The PlayCanvas engine is far more mature now, with WebGPU support, 3D Gaussian Splatting, and a full component system, but the fundamentals were already there. Ambient occlusion without baking, simple particle systems, physics tuned for that looping flight path. Check out the PlayCanvas GitHub to see what a decade of WebGL development looks like.