Marches & Gnats

Marches & Gnats is a story-driven coding puzzle game inspired by Advent of Code, set in 19th-century Estonia during the Romanticism period and the Cultural Awakening. You play as a student secretly building a mechanical “Logic Mill” (aka Turing Machine) while solving logic and coding challenges woven into a historical narrative.

Unlike AoC, the game rewards efficiency over speed. Each quest builds on a shared Turing-machine core, pushing you to invent abstractions and even design your own language as the puzzles grow in complexity.

I built the product end-to-end, from game design and story arc to the backend architecture, editor tooling, and deployment pipeline.

See the launch blog post and the Reddit launch thread.