Updates

Version numbers read big.feature.fix — the first number moves for a big change in how the platform works, the second when we add something new, the third when we fix and polish what's already here.

1. 7.25.1 New featuresAugust 28, 2026

   Lanternfall, and everything that glows actually glows

   • ANYTHING MEANT TO GLOW HAS BEEN GLOWING AT A TWENTIETH OF ITS BRIGHTNESS. Every screen, neon strip, coin, crystal and warning light in every game that also has behaviour attached to it — which is most of them — was being dimmed to almost nothing a fraction of a second after it was drawn. It was found by building a game about collecting lights and photographing twelve black holes on a lawn. Every card on the shelf has been taken again.
   • LANTERNFALL — a garden at night, twelve lanternflies on the grass and moths coming in from both gates. Walk into a light to take it, click a moth to see it off, and three touches is all you have. About five minutes.
   • It is also the first game here made entirely out of other people's words. Creators can now publish a RECIPE to the shared library — not just a thing, but a way of making things: a scoreboard, an enemy that hunts you, a collectable, a tiled floor, a wall, a spawner. Eighteen of them are on the shelf on day one, all lifted out of games this platform has already shipped, and Lanternfall is built from nothing else.
   • Two of our own games were rebuilt out of that library to check it: same game, identical down to the last object, with the recipes no longer copied into them.
2. 7.24.1 New featuresAugust 26, 2026

   Every ending makes a noise

   • WIN OR LOSE, YOU HEAR IT. Sixty of our sixty-three games ended in silence — not because sound was hard, but because it had to be remembered game by game, sixty-three times, and it was remembered twice. Now the game itself says so: a fanfare when you win, a different sound when you don't. If a game already chose its own noise for that moment, it keeps it.
   • THE MOON HAS BEEN TAKEN OFF THE ROAD. There was a five-metre moon hovering over a street corner in City-300 — in the picture on the shelf, blocking the buildings behind it. It had been there for three weeks and nothing could find it, because it was not part of the city: it was the model file itself, left standing at the centre of the world after the city had finished copying it. Every world is checked for this now.
   • Small worlds got a little tidier with it. Anything the renderer loads once and copies — a car, a lamp, a person — used to leave an extra copy of itself at the middle of the map.
3. 7.23.1 New featuresAugust 23, 2026

   Get in the car

   • YOU CAN GET INTO A CAR AND OUT OF IT AGAIN. Until now a game was either a driving game or a walking one for its whole life — the decision was made before you arrived. Night City is both: walk up to a parked car, get in, drive across the district, stop on a lit PARK bay and step out. Two vehicles, and they handle nothing like each other.
   • The streets are moving. Traffic used to be built from the old city's road grid whatever world it was in, so a second city's cars would have driven down streets that do not exist. Every world says where its own roads are now — Night City has two hundred and twenty cars and a crowd on the pavements.
   • AND IT HAS A SOUNDTRACK. Sixty of our sixty-two games make no sound at all, which nobody had counted until last week. This one plays, and the speakers on Watson's corners get louder as you walk up to them.
   • Your headlights stay with the car when you get out of it, which sounds like nothing and was four spotlights following a pedestrian down the pavement.
4. 7.22.1 New featuresAugust 23, 2026

   Night City

   • A KILOMETRE OF CITY AFTER DARK, and no story to follow. Six districts — Watson, Westbrook, City Centre, Heywood, Santo Domingo and Pacifica — each built differently: market neon and clutter in one, glass towers in another, chimneys and cargo in the third, and a resort in the west that was never finished.
   • It is bigger than the city we already had and costs less to draw: a third of the meshes and fewer draw calls, over nearly twice the area.
   • YOU CANNOT WALK THROUGH THE BUILDINGS. Every block is solid, which sounds obvious and has never been true here before — the old city lets you stroll through a tower block.
   • There are people in the streets. Nine of them, standing about their business in every district, and you can talk to them from the next round on.
   • Megabuilding H10 has a lift, and the lift goes to the roof.
   • Stand in all six districts and the city is yours. Pacifica is counting, though: thirty seconds inside and the Voodoo Boys find you.
5. 7.21.2 Fixes & polishAugust 23, 2026

   The city can be heard, and the lamps are all lit

   • CITY-300 HAS NEVER MADE A SOUND. Ten street speakers and a city ambience, all loaded, all silent, for as long as the city has existed — and the last release's fix was not enough, because a sound still downloading when the world asks it to play was never asked again. It plays the moment it arrives now, and it starts from what the browser says rather than from what we had written down.
   • A WORLD WITH A SUN AND A MOON IN IT WAS LOSING TWO OF ITS LAMPS. Six lights is the budget; the sun and the moon were being counted against it, so worlds with both built four of the six they asked for. Emberwatch and Starfall are where you can see it.
   • City-300 no longer starts you inside a shop. The old arrival spot was on the kerb — and the building behind that kerb is the mall, so the first thing you saw was the back of a shelf. You arrive on the road now.
   • A hundred and thirty-seven things in the city catalogue were the wrong size, most of them fourteen metres tall — cars, bins, postboxes, doors, walls, stairs. They are measured now, and a whole modular building kit came back with them.
   • A driving game can no longer be written with a first-person camera by mistake. The throttle did nothing and said nothing; it is refused with a message now.
6. 7.21.1 New featuresAugust 23, 2026

   Redline, at night, with the rivals actually moving

   • THE FOUR RIVAL CARS WERE NEVER MOVING. They drove the circuit perfectly inside the game and their pictures stayed on the grid — anything that moves was being drawn the cheap way, which only works for things that do not. Fixed, and nothing else in the catalogue can hit it now.
   • It is night. Headlights, tail lamps, glowing kerbs, a sky with stars and a moon, mountains on the horizon and a city across the valley.
   • It has an engine. Not a recording — a real one, whose pitch and weight follow what you are doing with the throttle, with a gearbox you can hear.
   • PICK YOUR CAR, THEN PICK YOUR CIRCUIT. Three cars that genuinely handle differently — one turns, one is balanced, one is brutal in a straight line — and three circuits offered up front instead of chained behind fifteen laps.
   • No speed limit. None of the three has a top speed; what stops you is the air, and the fastest settles somewhere past 900 km/h.
   • It now feels like you are moving. The view widens and the frame shakes as the speed builds, and the camera looks along the road instead of down at it.
   • AND EVERY WORLD LARGER THAN A STREET GETS ITS SCENERY BACK. Anything more than ninety-five metres away was being cut, whatever the world said it could see — so a race track had no background at all.
   • SOUND WORKS. It never has. Not in any game, not once, since the day the sound library was written — the audio engine was never switched on, so every coin, door, alarm, fanfare and street speaker in sixty-two games decoded into nothing. Two lines.
7. 7.20.1 New featuresAugust 22, 2026

   Two games that are nothing like the other sixty

   • REDLINE — a car race. Three circuits, four rivals, and no speed limit. You start last on a five-car grid, the clock runs down and every sector you pass puts time back on it. The Ring is empty tarmac and a 760-metre straight; The Quarry has things in the road; The Gauntlet has a lot of them and a hairpin at each end. About fifteen minutes.
   • THE HOLE — you are a black hole loose in a city, and you have three minutes. Anything smaller than you falls in, and everything you swallow makes you wider: bins, then benches, then cars and trees, then the building they were parked outside. Where it opens is different every time.
   • Both of these needed the engine to learn something it could not say. Every game here until now moved you the same way — hold a direction and go that way. A car has momentum and a heading; a hole has a size. Both are ordinary settings now, so the next racing game is a game and not a rebuild.
   • A swallowed thing used to stay on the screen. Scenery is drawn in a way that made removing it a no-op, which nobody had noticed because no game had ever removed things by the hundred.
8. 7.19.2 Fixes & polishAugust 20, 2026

   Lumen Play on a phone, and a question that was being asked silently

   • ON A PHONE, HALF THE NAVIGATION WAS OFF THE RIGHT-HAND EDGE OF THE SCREEN — including Sign in, which means anyone arriving on a phone could not open an account. Guide, About, Updates, Pricing and the language picker now fold into a menu, Sign in stays where it is, and no page scrolls sideways any more.
   • A game's own page now opens on a picture OF the game. It has been that way on the front page since the cards were captured; the page you decide on from was still showing the drawn cover.
   • When a game asks you something and offers you answers, the question is shown. It was being dropped, so some games handed you two buttons and no question.
   • "0% found it helpful" no longer appears on a game nobody has played yet. Nobody disliked it; nobody has voted.
9. 7.19.1 New featuresAugust 19, 2026

   Thirteen games that are not the same game twice

   • A puzzle with one answer is finished the second time you meet it — you are not solving it any more, you are remembering it. Thirteen games now set themselves up fresh every time you open them, and none of the new set-ups were made up: each one was searched, and only kept if it is still a real puzzle.
   • THE SORTING YARD — a different crate is wanted, and never one of the first four, so opening them in order still gets you nowhere.
   • BALANCE BRIDGE — a different crate hangs on the beam, and never one you can level by hanging the same weight opposite it.
   • GRAPH ROVER — the bridges cost something different every time. Exactly one route is affordable, and there is always a shorter one that is not.
   • PIXEL PAGE — a different page to build, and the list always comes before the list item.
   • CIRCUIT DETECTIVE — the three locks are wired differently, out of four kinds of logic, and one of them is always already satisfied when you walk in.
   • THE ASSAY — three new sacks to weigh, and the day always works up to the idea: right pan, then one weight beside the load, then two.
   • LEFT LUGGAGE — the straps change, and so does the colour that lies to you about them.
   • PROJECTILE RANGE — the targets stand somewhere new, always somewhere the launcher can actually reach.
   • BALLAST — a different cargo on the dock, and loading the heaviest first never works.
   • THE WARREN — a different hill of hares and foxes, and neither doing nothing nor shooting one side out is ever the answer.
   • THE THREE TRENCHES — the trenches are different depths, and the season is exactly the work they need.
   • THE CHANGE DRAWER — a different queue to pay, and paying with the biggest coin never gets you to the end of it.
   • PRIME GARDEN — the bed is numbered from somewhere new, so the primes are somewhere new too.
10. 7.18.1 New featuresAugust 18, 2026

    Nine games that answer you, and the last two cameras

    • Every game used to be a puzzle you clicked. Nine of these are not: things move, things ripen, things notice you walking past. And two views the engine always had but nothing used — a camera that stays put while you walk into the picture, and a side-on one — are now in games that need them.
    • THE DEW — walk through wet grass before the sun gets to it. You never click anything; the meadow answers your feet.
    • THE WINDFALL — apples come down one at a time and you stand where the next one will land. Seen from the side, so you can judge the fall.
    • THE ROOST — eight hens in a dark shed, seen through your own eyes, and the ones you cannot see are the problem.
    • THE CROSSING — three roads at three speeds, and they are never all clear at once for as long as it takes to walk over.
    • THE HIDE — eight ducks on a marsh, watched from a hide that never moves. A bird that lifts puts up the birds either side of it, so the route you planned stops existing. Read the marsh before you take a step.
    • THE COINING — a market stall where the price is never the same twice. Exact money, five coins at most, so paying in pennies is not an answer.
    • THE FLUSH — a ring of mushrooms on eight different clocks. There is no ripeness meter: the only thing that tells you is how big it has got.
    • THE ROOKERY — rooks keep coming out of the wood and you cannot kill one, only move it. The first game here you do not finish — you hold it.
    • THE LOCK — a canal lock, worked properly. A gate will not shift against a head of water, so you level the chamber first and then open the gate that is holding nothing back. The water takes its time.
11. 7.17.1 New featuresAugust 16, 2026

    Look at it four ways, and three new games about machines that say no

    • Every game now has four views: the one it was built with, over your shoulder, close in, and through your own eyes. Switch between them while you play.
    • The picture is sharper. The game now works out how much detail your screen and your machine can actually carry, instead of guessing — and it quietly eases off if the frame rate drops, so a slower laptop stays smooth rather than stuttering at a resolution it cannot hold.
    • THE LONG ROPE — a rope with 0 at one end and 100 at the other. Walk to where a number belongs and plant a peg. The posts are evenly spaced, which turns out to be the whole point.
    • THE SIGNAL BOX — five levers, three roads and four trains, worked by a frame that has refused illegal moves since 1856. It cannot be broken: pull the wrong lever and it tells you what is holding what. The one mistake nothing prevents is sending a train down a road you set correctly and chose wrongly.
    • THE PIN-DOWN — a freight train with no brakes but the ones you screw down by hand, and three hills that fall at different rates. The same six wagons go down all three, and the answer is different every time.
12. 7.16.1 New featuresAugust 15, 2026

    Your settings, your data, and a straight answer about both

    • You can change your name and your email address. Changing the address sends a code to the new one first — we will not move your account somewhere you cannot read.
    • If you change your address, we tell the old one too. If somebody else ever does it, you find out.
    • Download everything we hold about you as one file, from your account page. It includes a list of every store we keep, what is in it, how long we keep it, and what deleting your account does to each — including the parts the file itself cannot contain.
    • A privacy page and terms that say what actually happens, in plain words. The table of what we store is generated from the database itself, so it cannot quietly fall out of date.
    • We found and fixed something serious while writing that page: deleting your account was leaving five kinds of data behind, including saved game progress and the address a sign-in code was sent to. Deletion now removes all of it.
13. 7.15.1 New featuresAugust 14, 2026

    Your account, and a straight question about storage

    • Signing in no longer keeps a key to your account where any script on the page could read it. It moves to a cookie your browser will not hand over to code — the same thing your bank does, and it is a real improvement in how safe your account is.
    • Signing out now actually ends the session on our side, instead of only forgetting it in your browser.
    • You can delete your account. It is on your account page, it takes two clicks, and it is a real deletion — your games, plays and bookmarks go, and they cannot be brought back.
    • A notice about what we store on your device, with two buttons the same size. Signing you in needs some storage; anonymous usage counts are optional, and choosing "only what's needed" also deletes anything we stored before. You can change your mind on your account page.
    • We use no trackers and no third-party analytics. Nothing about you is shared with anybody.
14. 7.14.2 Fixes & polishAugust 14, 2026

    Half the download, the same worlds

    • Every 3-D model on the platform went through one pass: 85 MB of models is now 41 MB. Worlds look exactly the same — we checked by measuring all 891 of them again afterwards and photographing them.
    • Most of it was detail maps our renderer never reads and textures four times larger than anything on screen could show.
15. 7.14.1 New featuresAugust 14, 2026

    Woods that aren't one tree copied twenty times

    • Some of our plant models were never single plants — one file held seven different flower clumps, another held five different trees — and the whole sheet was being drawn as one object. They are separate objects now, so a meadow can have seven kinds of flower in it and a wood can have five kinds of tree.
    • New: pine groves in autumn and in winter, and pale limestone rocks.
    • All of it is smaller to download than what it replaces. Five separate trees now cost less than half of what the one five-tree file did, and we stopped shipping detail maps our renderer never used.
16. 7.13.1 New featuresAugust 14, 2026

    The things every game is made of are real objects now

    • The signboards, buttons, crates, gates, dials, tiles, scales and conveyor belts that nearly every game here is built from were flat coloured boxes. They are proper 3-D objects now — planked crates, braced gates, a turned dial, a beam balance with trays — and we made them ourselves rather than downloading them.
    • A sign is a frame around its text instead of a slab behind it, and the text still sits exactly where it did.
    • Conveyor belts had their rollers standing up on end like two pillars, sunk through the floor. They are drums lying across the belt, which is where a roller goes.
    • None of it changes where anything is: every one of these is exactly the size and shape it was, so no game moved.
17. 7.12.1 New featuresAugust 14, 2026

    Everything is the size it should be

    • We measured all 855 of our 3-D models properly for the first time, and then fixed what the measurements found. A cooking knife was 10.9 metres long. An office chair was 26 metres tall. A roof tile was wider than four city blocks. None of it is now.
    • Put something on something. Say a mug goes on the kitchen table and it lands on the tabletop — on a chair it lands on the SEAT, not on top of the backrest, because we measured where the seat actually is.
    • The people walking around the city are a better model than before, and cost the machine less to draw.
    • A world can no longer be built with two objects claiming the same name — it used to be allowed, and quietly made one of them unreachable.
18. 7.11.1 New featuresAugust 13, 2026

    Four more: a wall, a smokehouse, a hill of hares and a telegram

    • The Drystone Wall is nine stones and three courses, and the only rule is that a stone has to bridge the joint below it. Lay one that does not and it is handed back with the reason.
    • The Smokehouse gives you two fish, three racks and a fire that is going out and does not come back. The rack that would ruin a fish at the start is the best one in the house a minute later.
    • The Warren is hares and foxes on one hill for six seasons. Leaving it alone loses. Shooting the foxes loses faster.
    • The Telegram will send six words. There are twelve on the counter and only six of them carry anything — drop the place name and the timber goes to the wrong bridge.
19. 7.10.1 New featuresAugust 13, 2026

    A sheepdog, and a field with something under it

    • The Sheepdog has nothing to click but the gate. A sheep moves only while you are within five metres of it and it moves directly away from you, so where you stand is the whole game — and going into a full fold to fetch one back will lose you the lot.
    • The Field Walk gives you twenty-five squares of a field, daylight for twelve of them, and one trench to place. There are two hills of pottery out there and only one of them is a house.
20. 7.9.1 New featuresAugust 13, 2026

    Two more, and both of them are about a decision rather than a fact

    • The Crane hangs blocks on a counter arm: a block pulls with its weight times how far out it hangs, so the small one at the far notch beats the big one at the near notch. The last load needs all three blocks and there is no way round it.
    • The Change Drawer gives you three customers, twelve pence and a mint that makes 1s, 3s and 4s. Paying with the biggest coin that fits will strand you on the second customer — which is the whole point, and is not true of real money.
21. 7.8.1 New featuresAugust 13, 2026

    Four more games, and the first of them teach you something without asking you anything

    • The Three Trenches is an archaeological season: the spade only takes what is on top, nothing tells you how deep anything is, and the moment the soil goes dark you have one decision to make and no time to make it.
    • The Sluices gives you three ponds and three gates, and not one gate that moves a single thing — every one of them does three things at once, and they are printed on the gate.
    • The Word Engine does exactly what the word in its sockets says. The hopper needs emptying; build the machine that unloads.
    • The Ferry is the fox, the hen and the sack of grain, which is about twelve hundred years old and still catches everybody the same way.
    • None of the three teaching games asks a question, shows a quiz, or puts a fact on a score screen. If the lesson could be lifted out and the game would still play, it goes on the other shelf.
22. 7.7.1 New featuresAugust 13, 2026

    Six new games, and every card is now a picture of the game

    • Browse used to show a coloured gradient for every game. Each card is now a photograph of that game actually running — the board you will be looking at, taken from the game itself.
    • Six new games, all of them short and none of them a lesson: The Fox Run (it always takes the next open bolt-hole clockwise, so be waiting at it), The Narrows (three gates, one warden, and nothing whatsoever to buy), The Causeway (every stone bears you once, and you have to come home), The Firebreak (the only thing you have to stop a fire with is the heath you are trying to save), The Seating (six guests, five rules, exactly one table that works) and The Malting Floor (a lap of the floor is nine seconds and one bed will only wait eight).
    • Three older games — Circuit Detective, Projectile Range and City-300 — keep their drawn cover for now, because their opening frame is too dark to be worth showing. They are on the list.
23. 7.6.2 Fixes & polishAugust 12, 2026

    A shorter first screen, and the same games underneath

    • The home page used to open with every game we had ever seeded, including old samples written to test the engine rather than to be played. It now opens with the ones we made for you.
    • Nothing was deleted. Every one of those older games is still here, still playable from its own link, and still turns up in search — they just no longer crowd the first screen.
24. 7.6.1 New featuresAugust 12, 2026

    Taking your earnings out, and a way for schools to pay

    • Creators on Pro can now withdraw what they have earned. Withdrawals start at $25, and we ask for your tax details first because we cannot pay you before we can report having paid you.
    • Taking a game down never takes back what it already earned. The plays were real, so the money stays yours. If we ever need to pause a withdrawal we will tell you why, and the balance goes straight back to your account.
    • Schools can ask for a quote and pay by invoice instead of by card, which is how a school actually buys anything. Seats arrive on the account when the payment does.
    • A fix worth naming: if a card payment failed and you then fixed it, a late message from our payment provider could arrive out of order and put you back on Basic despite having paid. It cannot any more.
25. 7.5.1 New featuresAugust 9, 2026

    Safer to open, and a better first screen

    • Anyone can report a game or a creator — no account needed — and whoever reports it is told what was decided. A creator's first published game is looked at by a person before it goes live.
    • We ask for a birth year once, at sign-up. If you are under 13 you can play everything, and a parent or guardian confirms before anything is kept. Accounts we never hear back about are deleted after 30 days rather than sat on.
    • You can ask for your account and everything in it to be deleted, and it is.
    • The first screen of Browse is now a chosen order rather than a computed one: the game at the top is the one that is quickest to finish, and the first three are three different subjects. Once you have played something, your own history takes over again.
    • At the end of a game there is one box: "One thing you'd change?". It goes straight to the people building this, and you do not need an account to use it.
26. 7.4.1 New featuresAugust 3, 2026

    A game's numbers can now be worked out instead of typed

    • Anywhere a rule used to take a number, it can now take a sum. "How many arrive in this wave" can be worked out from what level it is, what wave it is, and how well you are doing — instead of being a number somebody decided while building the game.
    • Plants vs Zombies uses it: hold the lawn well enough and the lawn starts sending more. Play it badly and nothing changes, so the game you knew is still the game you get.
    • Conditions can do arithmetic too — "when this is below a third of its health" is now something a rule can simply say.
    • It is deliberately not a programming language: no loops, no randomness, and nothing that can make a game stop working. A sum that mentions something the game does not have is refused when you save it, with the name of the thing in the message — not hours later in the middle of play.
27. 7.3.1 New featuresAugust 3, 2026

    A place you can inherit — and the game finally tells you what wave it is

    • A world state can now name a LOOK — "night", "fog", "dusk" — instead of choosing a sky colour, a sun height, how much of the surrounding world to draw, and where the camera stands. One word does all four, and anything you write yourself still wins over it.
    • The seven looks are not invented: they are the ones Plants vs Zombies had already been written with, moved into the engine so every game gets them.
    • Plants vs Zombies now shows the LEVEL and the WAVE on screen. They were only ever on a board at the edge of the lawn, which is a thing you have to walk back to.
    • And while a game is being played, the strip of nearby things no longer offers you the scenery. Standing on the lawn used to suggest "Wildflowers" and "Butterfly"; now it suggests the game.
28. 7.2.1 New featuresAugust 2, 2026

    A recipe can now leave things out — and that is what makes recipes and inheritance work together

    • A recipe can have parts you may fill in and parts you may skip, and what you skip is simply not there. That sounds small. It is the difference between a recipe that has to spell out everything and one that can say "this, but like that other thing".
    • So a seed packet is now the plant's shape and one word, instead of the plant written out again. Plants vs Zombies sends 12% less to build the same game, Starfall 12%, and both are the same game they were, checked square by square.
    • The one plant with a lamp on it used to have to be written by hand, because a recipe could not say a lamp only sometimes. It goes through the recipe now, and so does Starfall's power node.
    • Fixed: the seed packets were full size when Plants vs Zombies was built through the recipe library, and the right size when it was not. Both are right now, and there is a test so it stays that way.
29. 7.1.1 Big updateAugust 2, 2026

    A new game built out of an old one's parts — and the lawn finally gets the screen to itself

    • NEW GAME: Starfall. A colony under orbital bombardment — five sectors, ten waves each, seven emplacements to build and five things coming for you. Play it from the front page.
    • The point of it is how it was made. Every noun in Starfall came out of Plants vs Zombies through a library of eight recipes, and its lanes run north–south where that game's run east–west. It is the first game here built out of a previous game's parts, which is the thing we have been claiming and had never actually done.
    • Games can now frame themselves. A menu, a level and a win screen can each have their own camera, and a level can put the world it stands in away while you play — so the game you are playing is the thing on screen, instead of a lawn in the corner of somebody's farm.
    • One message at a time. The game used to stack up to four notes across the middle of the screen and leave them there. Now there is one, and it goes away.
    • A kind of thing can now be LIKE another kind of thing: a heavier zombie is the normal one plus two numbers, instead of a whole page written out again. Same games, a third less to send.
    • Fixed: objects placed at a chosen size were quietly being placed at full size. The seed packets in Plants vs Zombies have been the wrong size since we shipped it.
    • Everything we claim about this platform that can be checked is now checked automatically, every build — that it is really 3-D, that a finished game can still be edited and still plays, and that what you get is a project with its own history rather than a page.
30. 6.1.1 Big updateAugust 2, 2026

    Classes, a much faster engine, and we measured ourselves against a hand-built game

    • TEACHERS: a class is now a thing you can make. You get a six-letter code; anyone who types it joins, and you see what the class is finding hard — weakest topic first. Learners join themselves and can leave in one tap, and leaving deletes the link. You see topics and how much of each game was finished. Never anything else.
    • The engine got 12× faster on a busy world. A full lawn of plants and zombies used to crawl; now it does not. Nothing about your games changed — they just run.
    • Big worlds are much cheaper to build. Repeating shapes — a 45-square lawn, fifty waves of enemies — can be written once as a recipe instead of spelled out item by item. On our Plants vs Zombies that turned 343 KB of instructions into 39 KB, for exactly the same game.
    • We built the same Plants vs Zombies twice — once here, once from scratch in plain code — and published every number, including the ones we lost. A blind judge liked the hand-built one better, mostly because our world is busy and our messages talk over the game. That is on our list, and it is on the list because we measured it rather than because someone complained.
    • Saved games, remixes and your learning report all still work exactly as before.
31. 5.11.2 Fixes & polishAugust 1, 2026

    We rebuilt one of our own games with the new tools, and measured it

    • One of our showcase games was built two years of features ago, the long way, one instruction at a time. We rebuilt it using the starter kit and a generator — the same tools you have — and checked the result piece by piece against the original: the floor, the walls, the enemy, the waves, the scoreboard, all identical.
    • It took a little over half as much to send: 4,098 characters instead of 7,200, 14 steps instead of 22.
    • Rebuilding it found three real problems, which is why we did it. One of the ready-made pieces had quietly dropped a visual effect. Another turned out to be too opinionated to work in a second game until we took one thing out of it. Both are fixed, and both were invisible until we tried.
    • Being straight about the size of it: everything we measure got about a quarter cheaper. That is the right direction and it is not yet the leap we are aiming for.
32. 5.11.1 New featuresAugust 1, 2026

    Games remember where you got to, and a starter kit for builders

    • Your progress is kept. Come back tomorrow and the game picks up exactly where you left it — the same lights on, the same score, the same everything. Nothing to press: a saved game here is just a game, so there is no special file to load and nothing to go stale.
    • Only you can see your own saves, and you can delete one whenever you like.
    • There is now a starter kit for people making games: six ready-made pieces — a scoreboard, a chasing enemy, a collectable, a tiled floor, a wall, a spawner — that you drop in with one line each. We built two completely different games out of it to check it holds up. A game that uses it writes about a quarter as much as one that does not.
    • Worth knowing: the kit pays off from your SECOND game. For a single one-off it is slightly more to write than doing it by hand, and we would rather tell you that than let you find out.
    • Your profile can now tell you what you have actually been practising — which skills, how often, and which ones you keep not finishing — weakest first, because a list of your best bits is a trophy cabinet, not a way to get better.
33. 5.10.1 New featuresAugust 1, 2026

    Remix someone else's game

    • Found a game you like? Take it. One tap gives you your own copy to change however you want, and it is playable straight away — no download, no setup, nothing to install. Everywhere else, 'fork this game' means cloning a repository and hoping it builds. Here a game is just its description, so a copy is instant.
    • The person you took it from gets the credit, permanently. Where a game came from is recorded when it is made and cannot be edited afterwards, and anyone can look up the chain — who made the original, and what has been built from it since.
    • You can only remix a game someone has published. A draft is somebody still thinking, and that stays theirs.
    • Your copy starts private, as a draft, and goes through the same review as anything else before it goes out. Starting from something popular does not skip the queue.
    • Creators: your stats now show how many people have remixed your game. A like is a click and a play is a visit — someone taking your work away to build on is the only one that costs them anything.
34. 5.9.2 Fixes & polishAugust 1, 2026

    We added two measurements that make us look worse, and published them

    • The scoreboard we use to say how much cheaper building here is now has nine measurements instead of six. Two of the new ones came out against us and are on the page anyway.
    • The worst of them: when we built our second game, we carried nothing over from the first — no saved piece, no reusable part. The from-scratch comparison carried its whole engine across. We built the tools for that two releases ago and then did not use them, and the only reason we know is that we measured it.
    • The best of them: getting a finished game in front of another person. From cold, that is an install and a build for anyone else, and for you it is nothing at all — the link existed before the game was done. Thirty times faster, and it is the first time we have been able to put a number on it.
    • The overall figure did not move: still three times cheaper. Adding the honest measurements cancelled out the flattering one almost exactly, which is roughly the best thing that can happen to a scoreboard you want people to trust.
    • Still not measured, and said plainly: whether the advantage grows on a big game. Everything above is measured on the two smallest ones.
35. 5.9.1 New featuresJuly 31, 2026

    Bombs, difficulty settings, saves — and four words we did not add

    • Anything that happens can now happen to EVERYTHING NEARBY. Put an area on an effect and it hits every object inside a radius — so a bomb hurts the zombies already standing beside it, not just the next one to walk in. It works on every effect there is, so the same idea removes, stuns, scatters or throws sparks.
    • A rule can now compare two numbers instead of a number and a fixed value. That sounds small and it is the whole of difficulty: 'keep sending zombies while fewer are alive than this wave wants' is one line, and the wave size is a setting. The same five levels can be gentle or brutal without rewriting a single wave.
    • A saved game is now just a game. Everything a world remembers — where each thing is, which state it is in, what the score was — comes back exactly as you left it, and there is nothing special to load: the save IS the world. (Keeping one for you between visits is the next step; the engine part is done.)
    • A speaker can change what it is playing, and fade instead of jumping. Same place you already set it, just saying more.
    • The part we are most pleased with: we added no new instructions at all. Four of the things on the list turned out to be already possible, so we built nothing for them — every extra word you have to learn is a word that makes this harder to use.
36. 5.8.1 New featuresJuly 31, 2026

    Write code that writes the game

    • You can now hand Lumen Play a piece of JavaScript that BUILDS part of a game — a spiral, a maze, a level read off a table — and it runs here, once, while you are making the thing. Everything it does becomes ordinary game data, checked exactly as if you had placed it by hand.
    • Nothing you write there is ever loaded when somebody plays. That is the point: the code is a tool that disappears, and the game is what it made. So a mistake in it costs you a red message while you are building, never a broken game for a player.
    • It runs with no network, no files and no clock, and it is stopped if it does not finish. `Math.random` will not work on purpose — use `game.random`, which is seeded, so running the same thing twice makes the same world and you can actually see what changed.
    • The best part is what it leaves behind. A generator can teach the game a word, and then the next game says that word in one line instead of working it out again. We rebuilt the city's three hundred coins this way: forty-three lines, where placing them one by one would have been about fifty times more to write.
    • Found while building it, and fixed: the city itself was being refused by our own checker, because a size limit written for a living room had been applied to a nine-hundred-metre city. Billboards are allowed to be big again.
37. 5.7.1 New featuresJuly 31, 2026

    You can teach the engine a word now

    • Until today, describing a world meant saying every single thing in it. Now you can name a piece of world, give it a few blanks, and say it again later with different numbers — a lawn, an arena, a row of lamp posts. It is called a macro.
    • There is a loop too. `repeat` takes a count, never a condition, so a world can never take for ever to build — and that guarantee is the reason everything here can be checked in milliseconds rather than by someone sitting at a browser.
    • Worth knowing before you reach for it: used once, a macro is slightly MORE text than just saying the thing. It pays from the second use, and by the tenth it saves about five times. The manual says so, with the numbers.
    • A macro is ordinary data, so the same one teaches another game the same word. Nobody has to ship an engine update for you to have a new kind of thing.
38. 5.6.1 New featuresJuly 31, 2026

    Seven numbers instead of one, and the two things the bad ones bought

    • Last release published a single measurement of what building here saves you, and it was thin: one ratio, on the smallest game we had. It is now seven, each one a thing a creator actually pays — writing the first game, writing the second, reading enough to change one thing safely, proving it still works, catching your own mistakes, getting it in front of a person, and what shipped wrong anyway. They were written down and committed before anything was measured.
    • Two of them came out against us and are published that way. The one that says a from-scratch arena took FEWER lines than ours bought a new tool: `place_pattern` puts a whole grid, line or ring down in one go, so a 52-block wall is one instruction instead of fifty-two. Building a game through the connector just got about twice as cheap.
    • The one that measured whether a mistake gets caught before it reaches a player found two of our own gaps. A state machine that pointed at a state nobody wrote used to be accepted in silence; it is refused by name now.
    • Plants vs Zombies opens on a level select — five stones on the lawn, and you walk up to the one you want. It needed no new engine: the five levels were already a machine, and choosing is one more state in it.
39. 5.5.2 Fixes & polishJuly 31, 2026

    We measured our own claim, and published the number

    • We have been saying that building a game here costs a fraction of building one from scratch. Nobody had measured it. So we built the same game twice — once on Lumen Play, once from nothing with a 3-D library and a lot of hand-written code — to the same written standard, and counted.
    • On that game, ours took about a quarter less work. Not the order of magnitude we have been implying. The full method, the numbers and why we think the test was the wrong size are published at docs/lp-cost.md in the source, and we will keep publishing it whichever way it comes out.
    • Housekeeping, in the open: the frame-rate floor we quote for the big city world is a number about a machine, and ours is slower than it was. It is quoted with the machine now, and re-measured rather than inherited.
40. 5.5.1 New featuresJuly 31, 2026

    Things that come after you, and Plants vs Zombies from above

    • Enemies can chase. Until now a thing that moved by itself moved one way for ever. Now it can head for the player — or for the nearest thing of any kind you name — so one rule on forty enemies sends each of them at its own closest target.
    • A new game on the front page: Ring. A walled arena floating above the fields, five waves of creeps that come straight for you, and a click to strike them. Five lives, twenty-six of them, no second chances.
    • Plants vs Zombies is played from above. It was built in first person, which was novel and made it impossible to see which lane a zombie was in. The whole lawn is in frame now, and the sun count sits on screen instead of on a signpost at the edge of the field.
    • Fixed: signs and boards in the older games faced the wrong way once you looked at them from a new angle — visible only now that a game can be seen from somewhere other than the player's own eyes.
41. 5.4.1 New featuresJuly 31, 2026

    A camera behind you, a jump, and a game that needed both

    • Choose how your game is seen. Every world here has been played from inside the player's head. Now a game picks its camera: behind you in third person, looking down for strategy and arcade games, side-on for a 2-D-feeling platformer, or fixed in one spot. Walking always means the same thing — W is away from the camera — so choosing a view never changes the controls.
    • Choose how your player moves. Walking speed, a sprint on Shift, a crouch on Ctrl, and a jump — with real gravity, and ground that can be a platform in the sky rather than the floor. Games that do not ask for a jump still do not have one.
    • A new game on the front page: Skyway. Eighteen steps spiralling into the sky, twelve coins to take on the way up, one step that will not stay still, and a flag at the top that only counts if you have them all.
    • Hits look like hits. A rule can now throw a burst of colour where something happened and shake the camera — a coin taken, a landing, a zombie down.
    • Your AI agent can set the on-screen counter. The scoreboard existed and only we could make one; now anyone's agent can.
    • Fixed: in-world text has never been drawn. Every board, plaque and sign in every game showed a blank panel, because the panel was mounted facing away from you and what you saw was the frame behind it. Boards read now, and they are sharper.
42. 5.3.1 New featuresJuly 30, 2026

    Plants vs Zombies — five levels, and things that move by themselves

    • A real game on the front page: Plants vs Zombies, in 3-D, on a lawn you stand on. Five levels of ten waves each, seven plants, five kinds of zombie. Choose a seed, click a square, walk into the sun to collect it. It can be won and it can very much be lost.
    • Things can move by themselves. Give an object a speed and it travels — and a state can change that speed, which is the whole of a zombie that walks, stops to eat, and walks on. Nothing needs code.
    • Rules can act on whatever touched them. When something comes within an object's reach, its rules can now read what it was and act on it — take its health, check its type, remove it. That one addition is what turns a pea hitting a zombie into a rule instead of a program.
    • Rules can count what is in the world. A wave knows it is over because nothing of that kind is left standing, and it can say so itself.
    • Your AI agent's checks now RUN your game's script. If a game's logic is code, the check plays it exactly as a browser would — ticking it, feeding it events, applying what it asks for — and reports a wave that never spawned or a handler that threw. The half of a game that was code used to be checked for nothing at all.
    • Fixed: anything invented through an agent quietly lost its material finish and its 3-D model. Nothing an agent defined could be glossy, glass or glowing, and models attached to invented objects were dropped on save.
43. 5.2.1 New featuresJuly 30, 2026

    City-300, and an agent that can look before it builds

    • A new game on the front page: City-300. The whole 90s downtown, with three hundred gold coins hidden through it — on pavements, at every crossing, in the park, inside the shops and the school, on all three floors of the mall, and one on every floor of all four towers. You collect a coin by walking into it. Get all three hundred and the city is yours.
    • Walk into things and they respond. Any object can now be given a reach, so that coming close to it is what sets it off — a coin, a pressure plate, a doorway, a trap. It works the same in every studio mode, because it is written the same way as everything else.
    • Games can show a counter that stays on screen. Name a world variable and what it is counting towards, and the player sees 7 / 300 wherever they are, instead of having to walk back to a sign.
    • Your AI agent can now SEE your game. Connected agents get three new abilities: read the whole world at a glance (including a map of the layout), search it for exactly the objects they need, and run a playthrough to check the game can actually be won — not just that it is valid. Before this, an agent could write a world and had no way to read one.
44. 5.1.2 Fixes & polishJuly 30, 2026

    Things you can see, and a city you can hear

    • Objects no longer vanish as you walk up to them. Getting close to a piece of street scenery turns it into a real, editable object — and until now that object was invisible while you stood next to it, and could be selected by clicking a patch of empty pavement. Both were the same fault, and both are gone.
    • The city has a soundtrack again. The street speakers were only audible within forty metres of a junction, which is about one per cent of a city this size, so almost everywhere was silent. There is now a quiet city ambience everywhere, the speakers reach further, and your own footsteps keep time with your walking.
    • Traffic you can actually see. Forty cars spread over seven hundred metres of road put roughly a third of a car in view at any moment. There are now two hundred, so a street has traffic on it.
    • People on the pavement walk properly — their pace and their legs now agree — and there are more of them.
    • The view from above is a view again, not a white haze: the smog thins out as you rise above the rooftops.
    • Plants vs Zombies is on the front page. Every object in it was placed by an AI agent through Lumen Play's public SDK — you can play the proof.
45. 5.1.1 Big updateJuly 29, 2026

    Bring your own agent

    • SDK mode is a real way to build now. Connect the agent you already use, and before its first turn it can read what Lumen Play IS — every object, every sound, the worlds to start from, and short recipes for the things every game needs: waves, grids, stages, scoring, endings. It arrives knowing the platform instead of discovering it one question at a time.
    • The SDK preview: a full-screen, playable window on whatever your agent is building, updating while it works. A Lumen Play game runs on our engine, so there is no localhost to run it on — this is where the work becomes visible.
    • Every save is now a version you can go back to, labelled with what it did. Your agent names its own batches, so the history reads like a story rather than a list of edits, and a bad turn is never a lost game.
    • Sound. Objects can make it, states can silence it, and anything that happens can play it. Walk the City and the street speakers get louder as you approach.
    • The City moves: traffic on the roads, people on the pavement, lifts that actually take you up, and doors into every building that has an inside. Everything on the street except the buildings is now a real object you can edit — walk up to a bin and it becomes yours to change.
46. 4.3.1 New featuresJuly 27, 2026

    Lumen Play has a face

    • A real mark, and a real icon set. Every emoji that was standing in for an icon has been replaced by one drawn family — the same weight, the same grid, the same light — so the platform looks like one product instead of whatever your operating system happened to draw.
    • Light behaves properly on surfaces now: cards catch a sheen from above, the active tab is lit along its top edge, and the accents run as gradients rather than flat colour.
47. 4.2.1 New featuresJuly 27, 2026

    A game that thinks while you play it

    • Derivative Hill now measures the ground under your feet. Walk anywhere on the ridge — between the posts, halfway up a slope — and the live board reads the real height and the real gradient at that exact spot. It is not a lookup: creator code runs while you play and differentiates the hill where you are standing.
    • Scripts can now ask where the player is. Any game you write can react to where someone walks, not only to what they click.
48. 4.1.1 Big updateJuly 27, 2026

    Ten real games, a world that can speak, and a place to learn how to build

    • TEN NEW GAMES, on the front page now. Fraction Kitchen (the recipe wants ⅚ and there is no ⅚ jug). Circuit Detective (three locks, and one of them is already open when you walk in). Projectile Range. Graph Rover (the route with fewest crossings runs you out of fuel). The Sorting Yard (twelve crates, four openings). Derivative Hill. Balance Bridge. Pixel Page. Prime Garden. Momentum Lab. Every one can be finished, every one tells you why you were wrong, and none of them can be beaten by clicking everything.
    • WORLDS CAN SHOW WORDS. Until now nothing built here could put a single sentence in front of a player — no score, no question, no explanation that stayed on screen. Now there are boards, and they keep themselves up to date: write "Score: {score}" once and it follows the game. Along with them came twenty-five other things games kept needing — a button you can press, dials, a balance beam, a launcher, a conveyor, numbered tiles, gates, keys, coins, mirrors, thermometers.
    • THE BOOST ENGINE. A design library, in the studio: 25 knowledge points across maths, physics and computer science, 18 mechanisms that make them playable, and 20 game designs by style. Tell it what you want someone to learn and it answers with the idea, where learners usually go wrong, the mechanisms that carry it, and game shapes that fit. Your own agent can read all of it too, through SDK mode.
    • YOUR CODE CAN RUN WHILE PEOPLE PLAY. Scripts used to build a game and then stop. Now a game can carry code that is alive during play — for a maths game that asks a different question every round, a scoring formula, a real simulation. It runs sandboxed with a time limit, so a mistake stops the script and not the game.
    • Fixed: a published behaviour block could be browsed and installed but never actually applied to anything, and published blocks of that kind never reached the studio at all.
49. 3.2.1 New featuresJuly 27, 2026

    See every building block — and get paid when your game is played

    • THE BRICK LIBRARY. There's now a page showing every object, behaviour and package a Lumen Play game can be built from — the 139 we ship and everything creators have published, in one list. Pick anything to spin it around in 3-D next to a person-height post so you can see how big it really is, read how it's put together, and copy the one line that puts it in your world. Find it in the House studio.
    • THE CREATOR FUND NOW PAYS BY ITSELF. Every day, each of your published games earns points for the plays it got, multiplied by how well it was received — the same measure that decides what we recommend, so there's only one definition of a good game. A brand-new game with no ratings yet still earns; a well-received one earns about three times what a poorly-received one does from the same number of plays. Your account page shows the points, which game earned them, and what they're worth. Withdrawals still aren't open, and we'll say so until they are.
    • Fixed: objects that glow, and objects with grass growing on top, could not be published to the library at all — the world could draw them but the library refused them.
50. 3.1.1 Big updateJuly 24, 2026

    Accounts, plans, and the two things creators couldn't do

    • A proper way in. Sign in with Google, with GitHub, with a 6-digit code we email you, or with a password — whichever you pick, it's the same account. Signing up with a password and later using Google no longer leaves you with two.
    • Lumen Play still works without an account: the sign-in page has a Skip, and playing needs nothing. Studio, Bookmarks and your account send you to sign in and bring you straight back to where you were going.
    • Plans. Basic is free forever and covers everything except earning — play, comment, build, publish, and share objects with the library. Pro ($20/month) adds the creator fund and lets you charge for your games. Enterprise ($100/month) is for schools. Your account page shows what you've earned; withdrawals aren't open yet, and it says so.
    • YOU CAN BRING YOUR OWN 3D MODELS. Until now an object could only be built from boxes, cylinders and spheres unless we added the model ourselves. Now you can upload a .glb, or paste a link to one, and build an object around it — a chess set with real pieces, a character that moves. It works from all three studio modes, and Lumen Play stores the file so your object keeps working even if the original link disappears.
    • Hand mode can be programmed. `scripts/` files are real JavaScript that BUILDS your game: write a loop for a chessboard instead of typing 64 squares, and generate state machines from code. Scripts run sandboxed, and whatever they produce is checked before it's applied, so a mistake can't break your world.
    • Fixed: a bad deploy that stopped the site updating.
51. 2.1.1 Big updateJuly 24, 2026

    Three ways to build

    • Building or editing a house now starts by choosing HOW you want to work. The same worlds and the same building blocks, three different doors — and you can switch between them at any time.
    • ⚡ Flash is what you already had: describe what you want to teach and our agents design and build it with you.
    • 🔌 SDK connects the agent you already use — Claude Code, Cursor, or your own. Issue an access token, run one command, and it can see every building block on the platform, read and edit your games, and publish new blocks. It edits through the same checked vocabulary our agents use, so nothing it writes can produce a game that doesn't run.
    • ✋ Hand opens your game as files, with an editor that knows the whole vocabulary: every object suggested as you type, and anything that wouldn't work underlined before you save. The real world runs beside it — press Run and you're playing what you just wrote.
    • The building-block library. Objects, modulars and frames you invent can now be published for every creator to build with, from any of the three modes. Someone makes a chess set once and the whole platform has chess.
    • Import a game from a public GitHub repository, and step back to any earlier version of a game you've saved.
    • Access tokens are scoped, revocable, and shown only once. A read-only one lets an agent look without changing anything.
52. 1.1.1 Fixes & polishJuly 23, 2026

    Steadier ground, and a sky with a sun in it

    • The platform no longer fails to start when its database is slow to wake. It now opens for business first and connects behind the scenes, so a sleepy database means a slow first page instead of a site that never comes up.
    • Trees stopped hanging off the edge of the Standard world. Objects built from 3-D models now land exactly where you place them, which also fixes anything else that quietly rendered metres from its spot.
    • The sheep pen and pig sty moved clear of the plateau rim — animals wander, and they were wandering into the sky.
    • Light is now something you place. The Standard world has a real sun and moon; the Future world has a cold distant star. Move them and every lit and shaded surface moves with them.
    • Lamps light rooms. Anything with an on/off switch now actually brightens what's around it when you switch it on — including every lamp built before this update.
    • New 🔆 Light source modular: make any object cast light, right where you're standing. Worlds with no lights at all keep the daylight they always had, so you can never light yourself into a black screen.
    • This Updates page, which is what you're reading.