Independent game + technology studio

Gnarled Helix LLC

What's a mechanic nobody's tried yet?

We build games, tools, and technology around ideas we haven't seen done before.

Gnarled Helix is an independent, remote-first game and technology studio. We explore unconventional ideas through games, developer tools, and the technology needed to build them.

  • Founded 2022
  • Remote-first
  • Games + Tools + Technology

Explore our work

01What if your army was the factory?

Factory Chess

Playable prototype · free in your browser

Chess, on the same sixty-four squares as a working factory. Captured pieces leave scrap where they died. Park a pawn on the heap to mine it, lay belt to haul the ore to a bishop to be refined, and on to a rook that smelts it into new pieces.

Every turn is a chess move plus two belt parts — so industry never costs you tempo. It costs you board space.

It runs in the browser, free — solo runs against our own engine, Versus over a shared link, or one screen handed back and forth. A prototype, and our first game to release.

More about Factory ChessPlay the prototype

02What if your spells were code you wrote?

Open Sourcerer

In development

A 2D platformer where you write your spells in JavaScript and use them to solve puzzles and defeat enemies.

The spells aren't spell-flavoured menu options. They're real JavaScript, written in an editor inside the game and run by a sandboxed interpreter — the thing you get better at, as you play, is writing code.

We're approaching programming education fun-first. We won't prepare you for a job in software engineering — we want to show you whether you enjoy it. The demo below runs on the game's real engine: the code in that editor really executes.

More about Open SourcererWishlist on Steam

03What if a level editor were multiplayer?

Tauric Studio

Free today

A 2D map and graphics editor where artists and game designers build levels together, in real time.

Everyone opens the same map and an edit lands for everyone the moment it's made — no export, send, import, merge. It isn't tied to any one engine: entity types come from the assets you upload, and maps export to Tiled TMJ, GeoJSON, SVG, and DXF/DWG.

Tauric Studio is free, and live today at tauric.tools.

More about Tauric Studiotauric.tools
The Tauric Studio editor: an entity palette on the left listing a player, enemies and objects, a canvas where a level is being drawn as cyan outlines over tiles, and inspector and layer panels on the right.

Sometimes the idea needs new technology.So we build it.

Our products are built on technology developed inside Gnarled Helix, including a web-first game engine designed around performance, experimentation, and the needs of the projects we build.

  1. Game
  2. Engine
  3. Tools
  4. Open source

Open source

Built here. Shared back.

We believe useful technology should be shared.

We contribute back to the open source community. Gnarled Helix has published the three-aseprite and protosprite rendering packages for anyone to use — and protosprite is drawing the characters on this page.

The team

A small team. Big questions.

Robert Brownstein

Founder

Alvin

Engineer

Bruno Cortés

Lead Pixel Artist

Jan-Nikolay Jäckel

Lead Concept Artist

Meet the team

Have a strange idea? We probably want to hear it.

Get in touch

info@gnarledhelix.com