Every year, Tighten builds a puzzle for Laracon.

We’ve run typing challenges, coding challenges, and, last year, an entire game-building challenge.

It's a fun chance for us to build something for the community, give some prizes away, and flex some of our coding chops in a way we don't always get to on client projects.

This year... I may have gotten a little carried away.

Over the last three months, I built a multiplayer, 3D, voxel-based recreation of the SoWa Power Station, the venue for Laracon US 2026. It has the main Laracon venue, every sponsor booth, eight puzzles, a place where you can build and publish your own worlds, and a virtual watch party for everyone who can’t make it to Laracon in person.

It’s called Voxacon—“voxel” plus “Laracon”—and it’s live right now:

Enter Voxacon

You don’t need an account to check it out. Just pick a nickname and an avatar color and start walking around.

This year’s Laracon Puzzle got a little out of hand

The original idea was pretty simple: I wanted to learn how Three.js worked.

I’ve wanted to build a video game for years, and I’d recently seen a Three.js project inspired by Minecraft. It threw me all the way back to the little Flash games I made in the ’90s, and I decided I wanted to try building something like it.

So, pretty soon, I had the idea to use this rendering engine to recreate the entire Laracon venue.

This is what happens when Tighten gives me three months and insufficient adult supervision.

I spent weeks poring over every photo, floor plan, measurement, and Google Maps view I could find of the SoWa Power Station. The result is just short of an obsessively accurate digital twin: the main event space, the stage, the hallways, the entrances, and even the sponsor tent next door.

Then I added multiplayer.

Then I added portals.

Then I added a separate Puzzle Realm.

Then I added eight puzzles (with the help of my wife and Tighten teammates), a world-building system, APIs, trophies, a watch party, and a disco ball.

Like I said: a little carried away.

We’re releasing Voxacon a week before Laracon for two reasons.

First, the puzzle is far more elaborate than anything we’ve released before. We expect completing just the Tighten puzzles alone to take a few hours, and we want people to have time to explore those and the rest of the world without sacrificing half of Laracon. Plus, if you choose to build your own world, we wanted to give you enough time to get carried away like I did!

Second, Voxacon isn’t just a puzzle. It’s a place we’re hoping the Laravel community will use before, during, and maybe even after Laracon.

Walk around Laracon before Laracon

When you first enter Voxacon, you’ll arrive outside our recreation of the SoWa Power Station.

You can walk into the main venue, explore the space, and see everyone else who’s currently online. When you get close to someone, you can wave or send them a brief message. I've found there’s something delightful about seeing other people running around the same space with you, stopping to say hello, and then heading off in different directions.

Everything you do now will still be there during Laracon, and Voxacon will remain online after Laracon ends.

Voxacon works on mobile, but desktop is going to give you the best experience. It’s rendering a full 3D world in your browser, so a more powerful computer will also handle it better.

A virtual Laracon for people who can’t be there

A lot of Laracon content is available online, but watching a livestream in a browser tab isn’t quite the same as being surrounded by the Laravel community.

So, while Laracon is streaming, Voxacon will become a virtual watch party.

Anyone can enter the venue, gather in front of the screen, watch the official Laracon livestream, see who else is there, and wave and message with the people around them. You don’t need a Laracon ticket, and you don’t need to be participating in the puzzles.

In fact, the watch party is specifically for the folks who aren’t able to attend Laracon in person: a shared place for everyone who would otherwise be watching alone and feeling a little bit of Laracon FOMO.

And when LaraProm starts, the virtual venue will get its own DJs, music, and disco ball.

Bookmark voxacon.laravel.cloud now and come back whenever the Laracon livestream is running.

Visit every Laracon sponsor

Outside the main venue, you’ll find two portals: the first, to the right, leads to the Sponsor Tent.

Inside the tent, every sponsor with a booth at the physical Laracon has a corresponding virtual booth. You can talk to their NPCs, learn more about them, and use the table at each booth to visit the sponsor’s site.

The Tighten booth is the first one you’ll see, because I built the thing and I get to make the rules.

Voxacon itself is running on Laravel Cloud, and the Laravel team have been incredibly helpful for a project with this many moving pieces. Joe Dixon specifically helped me optimize our Reverb setup so we can support as many people exploring together as possible.

Enter the Puzzle Realm

The third main area of Voxacon is the Puzzle Realm, which you can reach through a portal to the left of the main entrance.

The Puzzle Realm gives you two completely different ways to play.

You can build and publish your own world, or you can attempt the eight official Tighten puzzles.

You can also do both. We won't stop you!

Build your own voxel world

If you want to create your own world, you can sign in via GitHub and start building!

You’ll begin with an empty plot of land and a set of voxel-building tools—think Minecraft—which you can use to build almost anything you can imagine.

There are plenty of basic blocks for structures, paths, landscapes, lights, and decoration. But there are also interactive blocks that you can configure and even connect to an API you build yourself.

Your world has an authoring computer where you can manage the world's settings. When you’re ready to share what you’ve made, set your world to "public". It will immediately appear in the list of public worlds inside the Puzzle Realm, and you’ll also have a direct URL you can share anywhere.

World-building isn’t part of the contest. There are no prizes, rankings, or particular goals.

It’s there because we wanted to give you a chance to create in this world, too!

Complete the eight Tighten puzzles

On the opposite side of the Puzzle Realm is a hallway containing the entrances to eight different puzzles:

• PARKOUR!!!! — Self-explanatory, and probably the most difficult puzzle in Voxacon.
• Prison Break — An escape-room-ish experience.
• Starry Escape Room — A more traditional escape room.
• Red Room — A puzzle, riddle, and escape-room combination created by Tighten Director of Engineering Keith Damiani.
• CHEAPNFOOD — A story-driven escape room created by The Real Boss of Tighten, Imani Vaughn-Jones.
• Bean’s Place — A nostalgic, beautiful scavenger hunt created by Tighten Lead Programmer Jake Bathman.
• Leafy Labyrinth — A maze.
• Backrooms — Another maze, although a very different kind.

You can complete the puzzles in any order. Each one ends with a trophy, and the trophy wall at the end of the hallway will show which puzzles you’ve completed and how quickly you completed each.

Your progress is saved automatically, so you can start now, leave, and return later.

The puzzles are intended to be completed individually, and we won’t be releasing hints. We’d also appreciate it if you didn’t publish solutions or hints before the competition ends. Half the fun is figuring it out as you go!

Keith, Jake, Imani, and Mateus Junges also contributed code and ideas that made the puzzles—and the underlying puzzle system—significantly better. The rest of the Tighten team, along with several friends and family members, helped test everything without leaking all the answers.

Win one of two secret prizes

Anyone can play the puzzles, whether or not they’re attending Laracon.

However, the physical prizes are only available to people attending Laracon in person.

To enter:

1. Sign in with GitHub.
2. Complete all eight puzzles.
3. Collect all eight trophies by 11:59 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, July 28, 2026.

That’s it. Once you’ve earned all eight trophies, your entry is recorded automatically.

We’ll randomly select two eligible winners from everyone who finishes before the deadline. The prizes are physical, they’re secret, and winners will be announced through the Tighten Twitter account.

Tighten employees and the people who created the puzzles are not eligible, because they know too much.

Building software at the edge of my understanding

I built almost all of Voxacon myself, but I didn’t build it alone.

I’ve been writing JavaScript professionally for nearly as long as JavaScript has existed, but when I began this project, I didn’t know how to write Three.js. I’d never built a voxel renderer, a physics-driven 3D world, or a multiplayer environment intended to hold thousands of people.

My dear friend Claude helped me build much farther beyond my existing abilities than I would’ve been able to reach on my own.

And that experience was exhilarating, frustrating, a little terrifying, and incredibly educational.

At 11:50 a.m. on Tuesday, July 28, I’ll be giving a Laracon talk called “Building Software at the Edge of Your Understanding.” I’ll tell the full story of building Voxacon and share what I learned about using AI to build with technology you don’t fully understand—without completely surrendering your judgment, your ability to learn, or your ownership of the result.

After Laracon, I’m also planning to write more about the technical side of Voxacon and the systems behind it.

For now, I mostly want you to play with the thing.

Enter Voxacon

Voxacon is online now.

You can explore Laracon, visit the sponsor booths, build your own world, begin collecting trophies, or just bookmark it and come back for the virtual watch party.

No ticket is required. You don’t even need an account unless you want to build a world or compete in the puzzles.

Enter Voxacon

Come find me, wave, and say hi.