Meta Quest Update
March 31st, 2026
Jigsaw Night has released a major update expanding the game beyond puzzle building, adding foundational new features around multiplayer and social media creation.
The update introduces major improvements across the user experience, multiplayer, content creation, and puzzle customization systems.
Jigsaw Night is a multiplayer mixed reality jigsaw puzzle app for the Meta Quest platform that launched on stage at AWE 2025. Integrating hand tracking, co-location, mixed reality roomspace scanning, and Meta Avatars, it won an UploadVR award for “Best Hand Tracking Game of 2025”.
“We got a lot of feedback since our launch last summer at AWE. What started as ‘just a jigsaw puzzle game’ was so well-received from a broader audience than we expected that it exposed us to a variety of preferences across demographics, so we’ve been working to support player customization while trying to minimize the game from being overwhelming to the average player.”
— Steve Lukas, founder and solo developer of Jigsaw Night
A New User Experience
The menu system has been entirely rewritten.
Instead of a single menu screen that takes players directly into the game, it now features a combination of familiar interface patterns, including:
Smart TV-style layouts
Apple Vision Pro-inspired tabs
A MacBook Pro Touch Bar-style action bar
iOS-style screen hierarchies
Lukas believes these familiar elements will help connect new VR users with technology they already use every day.
“Every time an operating system gets a new update, it tends to move things around and make it harder to find widgets that have been relocated, slowing down productivity and creating frustration.
Now imagine having that experience and then picking up unfamiliar controllers in a fully 3D environment. It’s exponential culture shock.
So we modeled as closely as we could to paradigms that people will hopefully find to be naturally intuitive.”
Settings Designed for Customization
This philosophy extends to the Settings screen.
"The battle between making XR simple and allowing it to adapt to player preferences has been eternal.
However, that's a solved problem with mainstream consumer interfaces.
We studied television settings and those of several Smart TV apps before settling on a videogame-style model for the settings. It allows a very high degree of customization while providing verbose feedback on which settings are currently active.
It's most closely modeled after Fortnite's approach to this problem. Additionally, the settings screen intentionally changes the mental model of user intention by its reduction of clutter."
The redesigned settings experience aims to balance extensive customization with a cleaner, easier-to-understand interface.
Avatar Switching and Social Presence
All of this supports a new set of multiplayer and content creation features.
For multiplayer and in-game capture, the game adds the ability to switch avatars in-game. Besides the built-in Meta system-level avatar switching capabilities, Jigsaw Night also includes the Sample Avatars provided by the Meta Avatars SDK.
Available on the Unity Asset Store, the offering is described as providing developers with a set of pre-set Meta Avatars designed to increase social presence and enhance VR immersion. This capability has been available to developers since October 2024.
“We saw instances where people were sharing headsets with friends and family that didn’t look like them but were forced to use their avatars in multiplayer by default. This led to a form of body dysmorphia pulling them out of the experience, which is the exact opposite of immersion.
Now in Jigsaw Night, you or your guests can choose their avatar much like a Fortnite skin, and that will be reflected in-game.”
Built for Content Creation
Beyond multiplayer, the avatar selection feature also comes in handy with the updated LIV Camera system, which now includes LIV's livestreaming support.
“We absolutely love the LIV Camera system, and adapted it to appear more like a smartphone. We felt an increased urging to create content as we could envision how the final content could look as we were filming it.”
The Role of Social Media in VR
“If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? If you have an amazing experience in a VR headset, did it really happen if others can’t see or hear it?”
Lukas describes social media as "the most important multiplayer participant in your app." He views social media as a form of offline, time-delayed spectator mode.
“It’s so clear from apps like Gorilla Tag and VRChat how social media is the most effective way for VR content to reach an audience, and so we made tools to lean into that.”
Those tools include:
Gameplay tracking overlays that display puzzle progress on-screen
A selfie camera card that can be rendered as an overlay
LIV-powered livestreaming tools for creators
New Storytelling Possibilities
The team can already envision new styles of creator content being made with the toolset, including "Get Ready With Me" style videos.
With the ability to bring in personal images through Facebook integration, puzzle assembly can become part of the story itself.
Images can be gradually revealed as puzzles are completed, creating opportunities for surprise reveals, personal storytelling, and challenge-based content.
Community Feedback & Embodied Play
Andy Fidel, known for her work at Microsoft AltSpaceVR, Rec Room, and Women in XR, has been using Jigsaw Night in her weekly GetSocial events with an active community of beta testers.
"A lot of social experiences focus on giving people something to do. What's interesting about Jigsaw Night is that it gives people space to be together while doing something. The puzzle creates a shared purpose, but the real experience is the conversation and connection that happens around it." — Andy Fidel, Creative XR Producer
Lukas says the feedback from communities like these has helped reinforce one of the core ideas behind the project.
“And that’s really the heart of this game for me. I could talk for hours on the importance of embodied play, which has been replaced by mobile phone games and consoles.
Virtual embodied play with friends is such a different experience where you’re physically ‘handing’ objects to each other and moving around them, even when in real life you’re hundreds of miles away.
In a time where AI can give us robots to talk to and GenAI can make us unlimited images, it’s very satisfying to build an experience designed to bring us back to humanity, playing with real friends assembling pictures from our actual camera rolls that are connected to our actual memories.”
Puzzle Improvements
Not to be overlooked, the puzzle side of Jigsaw Night has received a number of updates as well.
“Originally I was just going to find a Unity Asset, make a jigsaw puzzle game, call it a day and go get a job.
When I didn’t find one that played the way I wanted it to, I hunkered down and built my own puzzle engine.
The lucky accident in going that route was the ability to evolve and customize it whenever I pleased, since I knew all the code paths having written every line.”
For this release, new puzzle options include:
Additional controls for puzzle piece rotation when shuffling
Optional puzzle box masking to preserve surprises
Expanded settings for double-sided puzzles
These additions make the game more approachable for casual and younger puzzlers by reducing puzzle complexity when desired, while still providing challenge options for experienced players.
More Stories to Tell
There’s a lot to unpack with this update, with more stories to tell and a developer diary Lukas maintains that’s now over 300 pages long.
“The journey in that log is just my story, which I’m looking forward to start telling online soon.
What’s even more exciting to me is that this game can be used by a variety of people to tell their stories, either on their own or in a shared conversation space.”
For Lukas, the long-term vision extends beyond the game itself and into the experiences players create together.
What’s Next for Jigsaw Night?
The game remains in Early Access.
“We wanted fundamental critical features for multiplayer and social media worked out first so that we can get our content pipeline fully in gear.
We’re working on pro tools that we can offer as a subscription, as well as a proper puzzle shop to feature artists that we’re putting together revenue share deals with.”
Upcoming priorities include:
Expanding creator-focused tools
Developing subscription-based professional features
Launching a full puzzle shop
Building partnerships with artists through revenue-sharing opportunities
Players can follow Jigsaw Night’s social channels for updates as these features are tested and rolled out, or apply for preview access to the social media creation tools.
