LOADING
warming up Sketchbook…
💡 click the game once so it hears your keyboard
👆 tap the game to start, then use the on-screen controls
Sandbox world
Play Sketchbook 0.4 online - controls, vehicles and tips
A pocket island where you can walk, drive, sail and fly.
An open-world sandbox squeezed into a browser tab: run around on foot, then get into a car, a boat or an aeroplane and keep going. There is no score, no timer and nothing to complete - the island is the whole point, and how you cross it is up to you.
Free to play, no download, no sign-up. Hosted with ❤ by GamerX.
Sketchbook 0.4 was created by swift502 and is used here under the MIT licence. Original project. GamerX hosts it; we did not write it.
How to play Sketchbook
You start on foot on a small island. W, A, S and D move you, the mouse turns the camera, Shift sprints and Space jumps - and because this is a physics sandbox rather than an animation, a sprint into a slope will genuinely carry you further than a standing jump. Walk up to any vehicle and press F to get in. The same keys now drive it: W is the throttle, S brakes and then reverses, A and D steer, and Space is the handbrake. Press F again to get out, wherever you happen to be. The island has a car, a boat at the jetty and an aeroplane on the strip, and nothing stops you taking the plane up, cutting the engine and landing it in the sea. There is no fail state to recover from - the world just keeps running.
Tips
- Getting out of a moving vehicle is allowed. The ragdoll keeps your momentum, which is the fastest way to discover the physics is real.
- The aeroplane needs actual runway. Lift comes from speed, so hold the throttle down the strip rather than pulling up early.
- The handbrake and the jump share the Space bar on purpose - in a car it steps the back end out, which is how you get round the tighter island corners.
- Chase-cam distance follows your speed, so the camera pulling back is a reliable read on how fast you are actually going.
- Nothing here autosaves, and nothing needs to. Reload the tab and the island is exactly as it was.
About Sketchbook 0.4
Sketchbook is an open-source project by swift502, built to find out how much of a full 3D sandbox could be made to run in a browser with no plugin and no install. It uses three.js to draw the world and cannon.js to simulate it, and the two are wired together closely enough that character movement, vehicles and ragdolls are all the same physics rather than three separate systems pretending to agree. Version 0.4 is the one most people mean when they search for it: the release where the character controller, the car, the boat and the aeroplane all landed together, which is the point the project stopped being a demo and started being somewhere you could just mess about. It has never been a game in the sense of having objectives, and that is the appeal - it is a toy box with a coastline. The code is MIT licensed and still on GitHub, where it has been picked over by a lot of people learning how browser 3D fits together.
What you need
- Graphics
- WebGL, which every browser from the last decade has switched on already
- Controls
- Keyboard — a desktop or laptop
- On a phone
- Not really — this one wants a keyboard
- Install
- Nothing. It runs in this tab.
Questions
- What is Sketchbook 0.4?
- Sketchbook 0.4 is a browser-based 3D sandbox by swift502, built on three.js and cannon.js. It gives you a small island and a character who can walk, drive a car, sail a boat and fly an aeroplane, with no objectives attached. 0.4 is the release where all four of those came together, which is why it is the version people search for by name.
- Is Sketchbook 0.4 free?
- Yes, entirely. The project is open source under the MIT licence and this page hosts it at no cost, with no sign-up and no paid tier. You keep no account and we take no payment.
- Do I need to download Sketchbook?
- No. It runs in the browser tab you are already in. There is no installer, no plugin and no launcher - the page loads the game directly, so the only wait is the one-time download of the world itself.
- What do I need to run it?
- Any reasonably current desktop browser with WebGL enabled: Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all work. It wants a keyboard and a mouse, so a phone or tablet is not a good fit for this one.
- Is it Sketchbook 0.4, sketchbook0.4, or skechbook 0.4?
- All the same thing. The project is written Sketchbook 0.4, but it gets typed as sketchbook0.4 without the space, and misspelled as skechbook 0.4 or scetchbook 0.4 often enough that it is worth saying so. There is only one of it, and this is it.
- Can I play Sketchbook on a Chromebook, at school, or on a phone?
- Yes on a Chromebook. Sketchbook draws with WebGL, which every Chromebook has had for years, and it is built for integrated graphics rather than a dedicated card. On a school or office network there is nothing here for a filter to object to on the usual grounds: no download, no installer, no browser plugin, no account, no chat and no user-generated content. Whether your particular filter lets it through is its decision and not something any site can promise. It wants a keyboard, so a laptop or desktop rather than a phone. The controls are listed above.
If you liked this
Controls
- WASDMove / drive
- ShiftSprint
- SpaceJump / handbrake
- FEnter or exit vehicles
- MouseLook around