First XR Puzzle Collection Built for Pen
✏️ Overview
Augmental Puzzles brings classic pen‑and‑paper logic games into XR, reimagined for spatial interaction and native Logitech MX Ink stylus support. Already live in Early Access on Meta Quest and Steam, the project blends relaxing puzzle gameplay with cutting‑edge mixed‑reality input: handwriting, spatial ink, and precision pen gestures.
It’s the first XR puzzle collection built from the ground up for stylus‑first play.
🧩 The Problem
Millions of people solve Sudoku, Nonograms, and Minesweeper every day — always thinking in ink. But XR has no high‑quality, pen‑native puzzle experiences. Existing MX Ink titles focus on productivity or creativity, leaving entertainment completely underserved.
Players want casual, comfortable, “pick‑up‑and‑play” puzzle sessions in MR, but the market simply doesn’t offer them.
💡 The Solution
Augmental Puzzles delivers a calm, tactile, pen‑driven puzzle experience designed for mixed reality:
- Native MX Ink support — purpose‑built stylus UX, not a controller remap.
- Scratch Pad — a freeform ink layer for natural handwritten notes.
- Spatial OCR (in development) — tiny on‑device models that turn handwritten digits into puzzle inputs.
- Classic + Spatial Variants — Sudoku today; Nonograms and Minesweeper next, with 3D puzzle types coming.
- Comfort‑first design — single‑controller play, passthrough environments, long session times.
The result: the first XR puzzle platform that feels as natural as solving on paper — but enhanced by spatial computing.
New: Logitech MX Ink Integration
🖋️ Native Pen Support
Fresh off our showcase at the London Games Festival, full Logitech MX Ink support is now integrated into the main game.
The physical purple MX Ink stylus is tracked smoothly through mixed‑reality passthrough, seamlessly complementing our one‑handed input design. No controller remap, no compromises — a purpose‑built stylus UX from the ground up.
📝 Floating Drawing Pads
New floating drawing pads let you jot down notes on the puzzle as a whole, or directly on individual cells — just like scribbling in the margin of a newspaper puzzle.
- Five‑colour palette for marking up candidates, chains, and deductions.
- Eraser mapped to the back of the pen — flip to erase, just like a real pencil.
- Pressure‑style thickness — stroke weight adjusts dynamically based on the pen’s distance from the surface.
⚙️ Custom Compositor Effect
Drawing thousands of strokes through Godot’s standard scene path was simply too heavy for standalone VR — so we wrote a custom compositor effect that paints ink directly into the scene during rendering.
- Direct‑to‑framebuffer ink — a Godot CompositorEffect drives a RenderingDevice pipeline that draws stroke ribbons straight into the scene colour texture, with full stereo support for both eyes.
- Per‑cell ink canvases — every cell, scratchpad, and keypad has its own independent surface, so notes stay tied to the puzzle and only dirty regions cost performance.
- Lightweight ribbon strokes — strokes are built as triangle‑strip ribbons with fp16 vertex colours and a tapered, distance‑aware width that mimics real pen pressure.
- Threaded eraser — a temporary stroke gives instant visual feedback while the actual stroke data is rebuilt on a worker thread, keeping the framerate locked at headset native.
- Multiply‑composite erase brush — subtractive blending lets you lift ink cleanly without leaving smudges or seams between cells.
🔮 What’s Next
- On‑device OCR to turn handwritten digits directly into puzzle entries — deferred to a later patch so we can ship the core pen features to players first. Still very much on the roadmap.
- Nonograms and Minesweeper — the next classic pen‑and‑paper games to get the Augmental treatment.
- 3D spatial puzzle variants — rethinking the classics for a world where the board doesn’t have to lie flat.
🎤 GodotCon Amsterdam
We’ll be speaking at the upcoming GodotCon in Amsterdam about our experience shipping one of the first commercial VR games built natively in the Godot engine — including the custom rendering work behind the MX Ink integration.
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