What is Awaken?
Awaken is a browser-native, WebGPU 3D game engine and editor - you open a tab, build a game, and share a playable URL the same afternoon, with nothing to install and nothing leaving your machine.
The pitch
Every other game engine starts with a download, an account, a project directory, and a build step. Awaken starts with a tab. The editor, the WebGPU renderer, the physics engine, the importers, and the TypeScript scripting compiler all run client-side in your browser - there is no server doing the work, no upload, and no login. When your game is ready, you export a single self-contained game.html a stranger can double-click or you can host anywhere.
Awaken is built in the spirit of Unity and Unreal - a scene hierarchy, an Inspector, gizmos, prefabs, materials, lighting, and physics - but it trades the install-and-configure ceremony for the reach and immediacy of the open web.
Who it is for
- Casual makers - the primary audience. Hobbyists, students, game-jam entrants, and "I have an idea" people. You are not a build engineer. You want templates, drag-to-place, a Play button, and a Share button. Awaken is designed so that no step of making and shipping a small game ever requires a terminal.
- Small studios - the secondary audience. One-to-five-person teams shipping a commercial small game. You will forgive rough edges, but you need the pipeline to be real: a build artifact, scene flow, save/progression, audio, and a runtime you can trust. Awaken's runtime is the same one your players run - so what you test is what ships.
Edit == Play == Ship
This is the idea the whole engine is organised around. In many tools, "play in editor" and "the shipped build" are two different code paths, and things that worked in the editor break in the export. In Awaken they are literally the same code:
- The editor's Play mode ticks the exact same
@awaken/runtime- scripts, Rapier physics, input, cameras, and UI - that the exported game runs. - The standalone player (
@awaken/player) is a thin shell over that same runtime.
So when you press ▶ Play in the editor, you are watching your shipped game. There is no separate "does it work in the build?" step to be surprised by later.
The loop between Edit and Play is tight and reversible: pressing ▶ Play snapshots your scene, runs it live, and ■ Stop restores it exactly - play-time motion never corrupts your saved scene. See Core Concepts for how Play mode's snapshot/restore works.
Zero install, fully private
- Zero install. There is no engine to download, no version to keep updated, no SDK. The landing page links straight into the editor; the heavy WebGPU bundle loads on demand when you open it. See Launching the Editor.
- Fully client-side. Your project never leaves your machine. There are no servers, no uploads, and no tracking. Saving writes to a folder on your disk through the browser's File System Access API - see Saving & Opening Projects.
- Real hardware rendering. Awaken renders on your GPU through WebGPU, so you get modern lighting, shadows, and large scenes inside a browser tab.
What you can build
Today, Awaken is an editor, renderer, and importer with a runtime. With it you can:
- Block out a 3D scene from primitives (cube, sphere, plane, cylinder), lights, and cameras - see GameObjects & Components.
- Import an existing project from Unity (
.unitypackage), Godot (.zip), or Unreal (.zip), or drop in.glb/.gltf/.objmodels and images - see the Import overview. - Light and grade the scene with forward PBR, cascaded shadows, and a Unity-style post-processing Volume stack.
- Give objects physics - RigidBodies and Colliders on the Rapier engine, with real contact events.
- Build a HUD or menu from UI nodes (text, panel, button, image) drawn as a DOM overlay, animate them with UI clips, and drive them from scripts with
api.ui- see In-Game UI. - Write gameplay in TypeScript with full autocomplete; a script's public fields become Inspector controls automatically - see Scripting.
- Export the whole thing to one self-contained
game.html.
📸 Screenshot - save as img/guide-overview-editor.png
The Awaken editor with a scene open: the Viewport rendering a lit 3D scene on WebGPU, the Hierarchy tree on one side, and the Inspector showing the selected object's components - the whole toolset in a single browser tab.
Awaken is honest about its edges. Some capabilities are opt-in (GPU-driven culling, BC texture compression) and some are on the roadmap, not yet shipped - for example blend-space / speed-matched locomotion, spatial audio, runtime LOD / mesh streaming, and networking. (The animation state graph, root motion, foot IK, ragdoll, a starter third-person controller, and a particle system are shipped - see Animation and the Third-Person Controller tutorial.) Where a feature isn't implemented, its page says so plainly.
A map of the docs
| If you want to… | Start here |
|---|---|
| Understand the vision and vocabulary | This page, then Core Concepts |
| Check your browser can run Awaken | Requirements & Browser Support |
| Open the editor for the first time | Launching the Editor |
| Do something hands-on in five minutes | Five-Minute Tour |
| Learn every panel, gizmo, and menu | Editor Manual |
| Understand scenes, objects, and prefabs | Scenes & Game Structure |
| Bring in an existing project | Importing Assets |
| Learn how a frame is rendered | Render Pipeline Overview |
| Add physics | Physics Overview |
| Write gameplay code | Scripting Overview |
| Publish a playable build | Building & Shipping |
| Follow a full project end-to-end | Make Your First Game |