This update is about giving both you, the creator, and your players more power and flexibility. I’ve added many whimsical features like save games and open-world stage transitions, alongside a massive batch of quality-of-life improvements for the editor itself.

Make long, multi-ending games with Save Games & Checkpoints!

Players can now save their progress! The new in-game menu allows for multiple save slots, letting players pick up right where they left off — and Whimsy will handle all the saving logic itself! This is huge for longer, story-driven games. You can now safely create them without worrying about data persistence.

There are also automatic saves when a player opens a new stage! And you can nudge players to make manual saves in important moments with two Scenario blocks to programmatically open a save or load menu.

You may also want to manually save and rollback to a specific game state through Scenarios — for that, the savegame update also adds checkpoints. Checkpoints exist in parallel with savegames, and each savegame can also carry a checkpoint. Use them to “revive” the hero when your players make a deadly mistake, or make a way to reset puzzles!

Player expansion

You can now fully customize the player’s appearance to match your game’s vibe. Change the colors in the Settings tab to create your own virtual console and translate all the button labels.

Players can flip the control pad’s position on horizontal or square-ish layouts, and, combined with full keyboard navigation support, touch and desktop controls became so-so much better!

Building sprawling worlds: edge transitions & tileset import

Creating interconnected, open-world stages just became more easy. The new Edge Transitions feature lets you set an entire border of a stage to lead to another one. You can even see a preview of the connected stage while editing, making it simple to build vast, seamless worlds.

To help you fill those worlds, I’ve drawn two big tilesets with 450 built-in tiles in total for both vanilla and future HD projects. And the improved Asset Browser with tileset and sorting modes helps you keep all your assets organized.

A sharper, more polished editor

I’ve poured a lot of love into making the editing experience faster and more intuitive.

• Under the hood, the Scenario Editor is now a separate bundle, meaning the main app loads much faster both on web and desktop platforms.
• Icons for all blocks make scenarios easier to read at a glance.
• The Tile Editor is now more powerful with tile rotation, export/import as images, and better undo/redo support.
• Countless small tweaks, from wider search windows to smarter block placement, make the whole IDE feel more polished.

Enjoy!
CoMiGo

If you have any problems, reach out to me in the comments or on the Discord server.

Full changelog

✨ New features

• Asset browser: Tileset and sorting modes, useful for drawing tilesets and just for making your assets look tidy
• Import built-in tiles for vanilla and HD projects: 450 tiles in total!
• Player & Settings: customize game player’s colors to make your little virtual console!
• Player: Add a button to flip controls’ position on horizontal and square layouts
• Player: Game menu with savegames to let users save and load their progress!
• Player: Keyboard navigation for all the menus and messages — supports both physical and on-screen keyboards!
• Scenarios: Save and load from checkpoints programmatically to rollback game state when needed. Works in parallel with savegames, and each savegame stores a checkpoint, too!
• Settings & Player: Customize labels in the player to translate them to your game’s language, or just because
• Settings: Add a button to replace fonts in ALL messages to a set one
• Stages panel & Player: Add ability to set a whole border of a Stage to transition to another Stage and see the preview of another stage on borders; very useful for making conjoined open stages. See the new “Edge transitions” section of the Exits tab in the Stage editor for controls.
• Tile editor: Add a button to rotate tiles
• Tile editor: Export and import tiles as images

⚡ Improvements

• “About” tab: Add license information for games’ fonts
• Asset browser: Remember the latest selected asset more reliably, including after duplication of an asset
• News feed: Force update the news when opening the panel (can’t trigger more than once in 5 minutes after the last news fetch)
• Player: On desktop, a pointer placed inside a player will no longer show a text-selecting cursor
• Player: Simpler WASD & chevron icons to better suite more game styles (and to reduce build size a bit)
• Player: Touch controls will be a bit larger on square and vertical layouts compared to previous version to better occupy the available space. Horizontal (desktop/landscape mobile) layout stays the same.
• Scenarios editor: Add a hint on where to create variables when opening a variable selector
• Scenarios editor: Add icons to all blocks
• Scenarios editor: Make block search windows that open when right-clicking the canvas or dragging an edge wider
• Scenarios editor: Nodes will now be positioned relative to their central top point, contrary to previous central point on both axes, so they don’t shift upwards when you, for example, add more text to dialogues or outcomes for flow-controlling blocks.
• Scenarios editor: Prevent block dragging when selecting text in plain text input fields, like in “On signal” block
• Scenarios editor: Shard off the scenario editor from the main app bundle: this will make loading Whimsy app faster in exchange for a small one-time delay when opening the Scenario tab in the Actors panel.
• Scenarios editor: When adding new blocks by dragging an edge from a handle into an empty place, the newly placed blocks will now be positioned so that the target handle matches the position where you’ve placed the end of your edge. Shortly, block placement in this way will feel more natural and logical, requiring less manual movement.
• Stages panel: Add a button to remove an exit from a list, and improve the UI
• Stages panel: Add a grid toggle
• Stages panel: Add hotkeys to some editing buttons
• Stages panel: Stage editor will now share the same save slots for its lastly picked actors and props with Prop and Actor panels, so when you switch between them an asset you’ve picked in a Stage will be opened there right away
• Text editor: If no text is selected when a toolbar button is pressed, the button’s effect will now apply to the whole text instead of doing nothing.
• Tile Editor: Add hotkeys for arrow buttons to shift the current tile
• IDE: Uniform background color for all inset buttons

🐞 Bug fixes

• Desktop version: Fix a bug that would overwrite your previous project after you create a new project and reopen Whimsy Desktop, without saving that new project, and hit “Save” (was included in v0.5.4 hotfix)
• IDE: Fix the small screen warning being too large to fit (oops) (was included in v0.5.4 hotfix)
• Player: Fix a bug where moving non-solid Actors would make tiles under them walkable, even when there was a solid prop under them.
• Player: Fix Actors passing through walls making walls non-solid
• Player: Fix an extra space after animated text pieces
• Scenarios: Fix “move to hero” and “move away from hero” variants of “Move this actor” block, fix errors with out-of-bounds movement
• Scenarios: Fix random number block returning values out of range (was included in v0.5.4 hotfix)
• Stages panel: Mirror and movement buttons weren’t affecting the foreground layer. This is now fixed.
• Tile editor: Fix Fill and Clear buttons not refreshing thumbnails of the current tile
• Tile editor: Fix mirror/rotate/shift operations not being tracked in undo/redo stack
• Tile editor: pressing undo/redo buttons will now properly update thumbnails