We start every product with a question:What's a mechanic nobody's tried yet?
Gnarled Helix LLC, founded in 2022 to build an educational programming game, is a small remote-first game studio. We seek to deliver new takes on classic game mechanics and useful tooling for developers.
Our first experiment was Open Sourcerer. But we didn't just build a game — we built an engine from scratch, focused on web-first delivery and performance, and that engine led to the two products that followed.
What if your army was the factory?
Free to play prototype · our first game to release
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.
What if your spells were code you wrote?
In development · Wishlist on Steam
A 2D platformer where you write your spells in JavaScript and use them to solve puzzles and defeat enemies.
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.
What if a level editor were multiplayer?
Free today · tauric.tools
A 2D map and graphics editor where artists and game designers build levels together, in real time.
Entity types come from the assets you upload rather than from game code, so it isn't tied to any one engine. Maps save to a compact protobuf format and export to Tiled TMJ, GeoJSON, SVG, and DXF/DWG — from the app or from a headless CLI. Runs in the browser.
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.
Founder
Robert Brownstein founded Gnarled Helix in 2022 while working for Boston Dynamics and leads engineering across the studio's products. He began prototyping Open Sourcerer in 2018 and rebuilt it in 2021 as a from-scratch TypeScript engine architected for web-first delivery — the engine the studio's later products are built on. He is the author of its open-source rendering packages, three-aseprite and protosprite, both released under MIT.
Engineer
I'm a software engineer who got my start in game development through Game Maker Studio. That early curiosity grew into building my own 2D game engine from scratch in C, and into contributing to the games we make at Gnarled Helix! The work I'm proudest of lives in the Open Sourcerer engine. I introduced behavior trees for entity AI, giving designers a composable way to author enemy logic, and overhauled the camera system to drive cutscene sequencing and dynamic camera zones throughout our levels.
Lead Artist
Bruno Cortés is a lead artist and pixel animator with over 10 years of experience across games, advertising, and interactive media. He's built his career on adapting to a project's visual language and pushing it further — blending craft with a sharp eye for mood and atmosphere. Based in Mexico.
Lead Concept Artist
Jan-Nikolay Jäckel, better known as "Hatwolf," is a Concept Artist at Gnarled Helix LLC, specializing in character, prop, environment and UI design, as well as high-polish illustrations. Alongside their work at Gnarled Helix, they continue to work as a freelance artist for a range of clients, including YouTubers, Streamers, and independent game development teams, contributing artwork to visual novels and other games. Their work is rooted primarily in fantasy, drawing on their background in the furry art community and a long-standing passion for expressive, character-driven designs. They are also the creator of the award-winning worldbuilding project After Silence, for which they develop both the writing and artworks.
info@gnarledhelix.com
