How do you make a game that people come back to again and again?

You need content. You need to make a world that has enough content to occupy your players for days, weeks, months, or even years.

But how can you make a big world that is fun to explore, while not slowing down your player's computers with an overwhelming amount of data? There is one solution that has been used in games for decades, and that is tilemaps.

Tilemaps let you construct your game world out of a grid of tiles. With grass, dirt and water tiles, you could construct a farmland complete with a river running through it. Reconfigure the tiles, and you could have a desert oasis or a murky forest. It is such a simple, yet powerful way to make games. Best of all, it is incredibly efficient to calculate and render, enabling much bigger worlds than you could have otherwise.

Now that Easel has tilemaps, you can make even bigger worlds that your players can explore together.

Up until this point, Easel has been best at making procedurally-generated games where the game world is created by algorithms in the game code itself. The new data file import feature lets you author content in other software programs and import them into Easel! This allows you to make much bigger, richer games using the best tools for the job, importing the results back into Easel to turn them into a multiplayer game.

The great challenge of designing a data import system is that it needs to be flexible. There are many potential data sources whether they be map editors (like Tiled), sprite animation tools (like Spine) or spreadsheets (like Microsoft Excel), each with their own structure and format. But most of all, as all things we Easel, we want it to be simple. Keep reading to learn more about the design trade-offs we chose to make this feature simple yet powerful.

By popular demand: you can now rotate the camera in Easel! Keep reading to learn more about this and other updates this month.

Like many game engines, Easel simulates physics in discrete time steps, or "ticks". There are 60 ticks per second.

Sometimes, if you have a fast-moving object, it can move so far in 1/60th of a second that it can have already passed through to the other side of a wall before the physics engine has a chance to notice it. This can cause problems like:

• Tunneling: A bullet moving fast could pass right through a thin wall and hit someone on the other side. Ouch.
• Penetration: For a hero jumping and landing on the ground, you want the hero to land level on the ground, and not partially sink into it before the physics engine catches the collision and pushes them back up.

Hotspots, nine slicing, fonts and more! Keep reading to find out what's new in Easel in July 2026.

While some people have been thriving, not everyone has been finding Easel easy to learn. Here is why that is and what we are doing about it.

Also keep reading to find out what's new in Easel in June 2026!

Spaces, contacts, shapes and more! The May 2026 update is here, with a whole host of new features and improvements to make your games even better.

We want Easel to be powerful enough to make the kinds of games you would play for hours. Popular multiplayer games like Among Us let you walk around an entire spaceship, completing tasks and evading impostors. Unfortunately, up to this point, games of that scale were out of reach for Easel, because the off-the-shelf physics engine would have to snapshot and roll back the entire world to support Easel's predictive multiplayer architecture. It's too much to do every frame.

Until this point, you were required to keep your world small. But not anymore!

Easel's new custom-built physics engine only snapshots and rolls back the parts of the world that change. That big spaceship might have thousands of objects forming the walls, the control panels, the vents, and so on. However, each frame, a surprisingly few number of objects actually change - perhaps less than 30 per frame as the players walk around and interact with the world. A smart implementation keeps objects sleeping while they are offscreen.

With only 30 objects out of thousands needing to be snapshotted each frame, a factor of 30-50x fewer than before, multiplayer Easel games with large worlds suddenly becomes feasible. Release the feral hogs!

Subcameras for parallax effects, TextSpark and other particles, and more! Keep reading to learn what is new with Easel this month.

Match blocks, statements as expressions, itch.io export and more! Keep reading to learn what is new with Easel this month.