Hotspots and Nine Slicing (July 2026 update) • Easel

Skip to main content<br>Hotspots, nine slicing, fonts and more!<br>Keep reading to find out what's new in Easel in July 2026.

info<br>Easel is a programming language that makes your game multiplayer automatically!<br>Intrigued? Visit our home page to learn more.

Examples​

The new Examples section of the Easel documentation is a compendium of<br>common patterns that you can use in your own Easel games.<br>It is intended to be a library of how to do things the Easel way,<br>so you don't have to reinvent the wheel, cart, horse and chariots of fire all by yourself.<br>Learn from them, be inspired, and use them!

Hotspots​

The new Hotspots feature lets you define interactive areas<br>in your game world that players can click, tap or hover over. Here are just some of the things you can do with hotspots:

Make a game where pirates collect their spoils by clicking on a treasure chest.

Tell the player how many rabbits they have left to catch when they hover over their "Can I come home yet, please?" button

Make Pandora's Box open when players click on it. If they dare.

Why are hotspots better than what you could make before by yourself?

Lag free: When you hover over a hotspot, it changes the mouse cursor and makes the sprites glow or expand (using a Strobe)<br>to invite the player to interact with them.<br>This happens with zero latency. Because Easel is an automatic multiplayer engine, if you coded this yourself,<br>there may be a delay between hover and effect due to the network latency.

Multiple cameras: Easel only sends the position of the Pointer<br>in the main camera over the network because sending it for all cameras would be more bandwidth-intensive and would not be necessary for most games.<br>For this reason, it is not really possible to code clickable buttons yourself in secondary cameras (like in a minimap, heads up display or inventory screen camera).<br>Hotspots let you detect clicks in every camera.

Z-order: Hotspots follow the same layering and Y-sorting rules as other sprites in your game,<br>so when multiple hotspots overlap,<br>you can be sure that the correct one was clicked on without having to calculate the z-order yourself.

To demonstrate hotspots, we have created a Clicking Objects example<br>where you uncover a monster in a crowd by clicking on them.

Frame Images (Nine Slices)​

Let's say you're making a medieval-themed game, and you want your user interface to look like it was carved out of stone.<br>Or you want to make a sci-fi game, and you want a metallic user interface with wires and lights.<br>The new Frame Images feature let you stylize the panels and buttons with your own images.

The key is that it stretches images using nine-slicing ,<br>which allows a single image to expand to fit any size panel or button,<br>while retaining their original look and feel.<br>This is done by dividing the image into 9 parts, keeping the corners the same size while the edges and center are stretched/tiled to fit.<br>Nine-slicing is a technique used everywhere in game development, and now you can use it in Easel too.

The new Shop example lets you buy fish for your aquarium. The shop panel<br>is stylized with a Frame Image, making it fit perfectly in with the aesthetic of the game.

Fonts​

Fonts are a big part of giving your game personality.<br>A handwritten script font might make your game feel more personal,<br>while a block sans-serif font with sharp angles might make your game feel more futuristic.<br>You can now use your own fonts in Easel!<br>See Fonts to learn more.

The new Fonts example shows you how to use a custom font to make the "green rain" effect from the Matrix,<br>where text falls down the screen in a green color.

Strobes​

The Strobe function lets you temporarily modify all sprites attached to an entity.<br>It is great for effects like hit flashes which confirm to the player that their Galaxy Sword really did hit the Purple Slime.<br>Strobes can be simpler than modifying each sprite individually, and work reliably when multiple strobes are applied to the same entity at once.<br>Now you can do even more with strobes:

The growth parameter now can take a Vector like @(0.1, 0.2) to scale sprites differently in the x and y directions.<br>For example, you could squash your hero vertically when someone jumps on them!

The new rotate and shift parameters provide new ways to modify the sprites.<br>Make your hero shiver when hit with a blast of ice!

Instead of beginning at maximum strobe, the swell parameter lets the strobe take time to reach its maximum before decaying.<br>This can make your shivering seem more natural instead of being a violent agitation.

The new Coins example lets you play as a little Obloid whose greatest joy in life is to pick up coins.<br>(Is he not but the common man?)<br>He bloats with joy whenever he picks up a coin, and that is implemented using a Strobe!

Clipping vs Substepping​

Easel's physics engine now supports clipping as well as substepping for continuous collision detection ,<br>which makes it even...