Progress Update: v0.9, 2026-05-20

First of all, I'm sorry for the delay in updates, I want to aim for doing monthly community updates and I definitely let it slip. However, I have some exciting news this time: Polymino's level editor is finally at a point where all of the basics are implemented, and I can finally switch to working on the game itself once again!

There are still some things left before the editor will be completed. However, its features have surpassed what is supported in the actual game, meaning I can use it to create test levels while I overhaul the code for Polymino's Puzzle Mode. I'm super excited to take a break from web development and start coding in my beloved C++ again.

By the way, if this is your first time hearing about the level editor, it's open source and you can check it out on GitHub! In the future, it'll also be hosted on Polymino.net where you'll be able to create your own levels!

Level Editor Progress

For the rest of this post, I'll share some screenshots of the features I've added to the editor since the last update. First things first, something that's going to be a massive boost to quality of life, all changes are now tracked and the editor has undo/redo functionality:

The history window in the above screenshot is heavily inspired by image editing software like Paint.NET. You can drag it anywhere you like, and click on any of the items to jump to that point in history.

The history tracking also allows keeping track of unsaved changes. The editor now has a status bar which displays contextual information including your level name and if you have any unsaved changes:

When you're hovering over the board, it shows your cursor position:

And when you're dragging junk pieces, it explains how to copy them instead of moving them:

The dialog for opening and saving levels has also improved significantly. Here's how it looked in the last dev update:

And here's how it looks now:

As you can see above, the dialog shows preview thumbnails now, and allows managing your saved levels by renaming and deleting them.

Finally, the most important feature that was missing in the last update was the ability to control which color of blocks are created when junk pieces get shattered. Polymino's engine has supported the ability for these colors to be predetermined since basically day one, and it does get used in Puzzle Mode already. If you try the Daily Puzzle and restart a few times, shattering the same junk piece each time, the resulting blocks will always be the same. Like everything else in the current Puzzle Mode, it's all generated at the beginning of the level based on its seed, but that won't be the case for hand-made puzzles in version 0.9!

Here's a screenshot of a level in the editor's default "Blocks" mode:

But when we enter "Next color" mode, we can see that if we shattered these junk pieces, instead of the usual random colors, these junk pieces are rigged to reveal a smiley face :-)

When the "Next color" mode seen above is enabled, the underlying predetermined block colors can be viewed and painted just like regular blocks in the default mode.

That pretty much sums up the progress I've made recently. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the post, I'm going to switch to primarily working on the game itself now, so activity on the level editor's GitHub page will slow down. But I'll make sure to keep you all updated here and in the game's Discord server!

Thanks for reading, and see you next time!