Planned Release Date: To be announced

Development Status

State of the Game

The team is hard at work preparing for a Q3 Early Access release of part 1 of 3.

We chose to split up the game into three deliverables at a reduced price point to maximize the shipped-feature/promised-feature ratio while getting market feedback in the near term; too many indie games sell on a promise they can't attain, and that's not what we're here for.

Part 1 of Open Sourcerer will focus on teaching absolute basics, and provide 2-8 hours of gameplay to complete depending on the player's ability to learn programming. It will ship on Windows, OSX and Linux, packaged as an Electron application.

We'll be frank. We've had to iterate a lot on our initial teaching concept, and that's eaten a lot of development time. To unlock the fun and unique part of this game, players need to have or gain a basic understanding of JS. It turns out that throwing pages of documentation at the user within the first 5 minutes of gameplay was a non-starter, and we had to break things down into digestible chunks with in-level interactions to deliver those basics while preserving fun.

Notable Feature Statuses

• The core engine and JS / magic runtime is fully completed.

• ~50% of core spell APIs are usable.

• ~50% of spell presets that showcase core APIs are done.

• ~95% of the way there with the Player and enemy interractions.

• ~10% of levels are fully implemented.

• ~30% of levels are greyboxed and playable.

• ~30% of the planned educational content / documentation at the new, reduced scope is complete.

• Efforts to upload and distribute the game to an initial beta cohort are underway. We have temporarily set the distribution as Mac-only as we work to prepare our tooling to interface with Steam.

• Achievements are not yet connected to Steam.

  Please check out our periodic devlogs on Youtube to learn more.

About This Game

Open Sourcerer is a 2D platformer where you use JavaScript to control and customize your spells. You will learn the basics of programming in JS in a safe, sandboxed environment with a mix of traditional APIs and custom spell dependencies - the building blocks of your offensive and defensive abilities. Solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and build your own abilities in a story-rich platforming environment. No prior programming experience is necessary.

Need to cast a fireball? Require the "fire" dependency in your code and instantiate a Fireball instance. Everything from magical attacks to character movement can be controlled through code, allowing for expressive play styles that allow you to front-load the complexity of combat into scripting.

The core game loop is learn -> experiment -> explore. In the learning phase, you'll complete coding challenges to unlock new abilities. In the experimentation phase, you'll tweak these abilities through constructor args, callbacks, and control structures, and in the exploration phase you'll test your newfound abilities against challenging waves of enemies as you progress across levels.

Will this game teach you to be a professional software engineer? Nope! That's not what this is for. This helps you answer a more basic question: "Do I enjoy programming?"

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

We are using generative AI for first-wave localization and some software implementation (Claude code).

We recognize that human artists and programmers take precedence over these tools, and deserve real compensation as opposed to the cheap inferior labor of neural nets.