Build Your Own Hot Potato Arena
By The GameBuddies Team — 2026-05-18
Paint a Map, Hit Publish, Play With Your Friends
[demo:editor]
Hot Potato used to ship with two arenas. Now it ships with a level editor — and once you publish a level, every host on the platform can pick it in their lobby. No download, no upload form, no review queue. Paint, name, share.
Open it from the Hot Potato home page — there's an "Open Level Editor" button below the tip banner — or pop ?editor=true onto the URL. From inside a lobby, the host's settings panel also links you straight in.
What the editor does
The grid is 25×15 cells, the same one every Hot Potato match runs on. You get a tile palette on the left — grass, dirt, stone, castle bricks, signs, boxes, doors — and a small set of keyboard shortcuts:
- Left click to place the selected tile.
- Click + drag to paint a stroke.
- Right click to erase.
- R to rotate the selected tile 90°.
- X to switch to Collision mode and paint a red overlay on cells you want to act as walls. Players and bots can't walk through them.
- C to clear the grid.
Load one of the official presets if you want a starting point, paint over it, and you're done. The status pill in the top-right corner tells you whether you're signed in. Click it to sign in directly in the editor — Google, Discord, or email. No need to bounce back to the home page.
Publishing
When you're ready, hit the PUBLISH ☁ button. The first time, you'll see a sign-in dialog. After you're in, you give the level a name (under 80 characters), confirm, and it lands in the community library within a second.
A few things happen behind the scenes:
- Your level goes into our shared content library, attributed to your account. You can delete your own levels later.
- A snapshot of your collision grid travels with the level so bots in any future game played on it know where the walls are. (Yes, that was a bug. It's fixed.)
- The community list refreshes every 30 seconds, so the next host that opens their lobby — or hits the refresh icon next to the dropdown — sees it.
How everyone else plays it
Anyone hosting a Hot Potato room sees the level dropdown in HostSettings split into two groups: Official and Community. The community group lists every published level newest-first, with a live tile preview rendered right under the dropdown so the whole table can see what's coming before Start Game.
Pick yours, start the round, and every player's client streams the same arena from our database. No client downloads, no version drift.
What's next
This is the start of a community-built map library. If you make something good, share the room invite — your friends will play your map and remember whose it was.
A few things on the list:
- Featured levels. Today the dropdown sorts by recency; we'll surface a "featured" group once volume picks up.
- Mobile painting. Editor works on desktop today. Mobile is on the list.
- Static cover thumbnails. The in-lobby preview renders live from your tile data, which keeps the system light. Pre-baked cover images come later.
Open the editor, paint something weird, and ship it.