Game Modes Are Here

Author: Youngjin Kang Date: August 15, 2026

New here? Start with What is ThingsPool?

ThingsPool, an immersive 3D chat app that runs in a browser tab, now has game modes. Enter play mode to explore a room and talk to whoever else is in it, or switch to edit mode to craft the space you actually want.

Until now the two were one and the same. Clicking a painting to read its title also swung the camera around it and brought up the editing tools, so there was no way to simply look at a room.

Play mode is for exploring: a first-person adventure through rooms you have never seen, shared with whoever else walked in. Anything you click introduces itself — a painting gives you its title and its painter — and you keep walking.

Edit mode is the opposite. Everything around you becomes yours to customize: your own avatar first — its shape and its colors, part by part, carried into every room you visit afterwards — and then the interior of the room itself.

Trade one painting for another, restyle its frame, stretch it across the wall, or take the wall out from behind it.

Separating the two modes also frees up the ordinary click. Picking an object up, eating it, repairing it, handing it to another player, swinging it at something — every one of those is a click on a thing, and none of them could exist while a click already meant "edit this".

#ThingsPool #VirtualWorld #Sandbox #BrowserGame #MultiplayerGame #IndieGame #GameDev #InteractiveMedium #GameMechanics #GameplaySystems #LevelEditor #CameraControl #Avatar #ThreeJS #WebGL

Enter the Portal

Door image by xadartstudio