Google has announced the accepted projects for Google Summer of Code 2026, and I’m happy to say that Tiled will be mentoring two contributors this summer:

• Kanishka (kanishka0411) on Enhanced World Editing, making working with multi-map worlds a lot more convenient and direct.

• Dagon Williams (UltraDagon) on the New Hardware Renderer, bringing Qt Quick based GPU rendering into the main editor. Dagon will be mentored by Adam Turk (biggeruniverse), who started the original Java version of Tiled and co-authored it with me.

About the Selection

We received a lot of applications this year (29 proposals submitted!), and with quite a few good candidates. Since we could only accept one contributor per project and we had a very limited set of mentors, several great and clearly motivated candidates did not make it in.

So to everyone who applied: thank you for the time you put in, and please don’t take a “no” as a verdict on your work. Several of you have already landed pull requests in Tiled, and I hope you’ll stick around. Your contributions are very much appreciated and you can learn regardless of GSoC!

What’s Next

The Community Bonding Period runs from May 1 through May 24, with coding officially starting May 25. During bonding we’ll:

• Have a kickoff call together, either this weekend or Monday, whenever everyone can make it.
• Go through your proposals in detail, refine them where useful.
• Generally get to know each other a little better!

We’re looking forward to a productive summer with you!