phpFarm now has a Steam page. It is not out yet, but from today you can put it on your wishlist, follow it and watch it grow. This is the first post here, so let us start with what the game actually is.

You are not a farmer. You are a PHP script running on a forgotten shared host, automating a farm. The last developer is gone. There is no staging, no backup, no ticket system. There is index.php, and there is you.

You write code in an editor inside the game. A robot named Fred runs it on the field and harvests what grows. You spend the yield on new language features — and then you write the same thing again, better.


This is the idea the whole game is built on. The skill tree does not start with bigger fields or faster robots — it starts with the language. At the start you can call harvest() and nothing else. Loops, functions, arrays and foreach are each bought with what you grew using the language you already had. By the time you unlock a loop, you know exactly what you want it for.

To make that possible, phpFarm runs its own PHP interpreter, written for this game: lexer, parser, bytecode, VM. Real PHP syntax, dollar signs and type juggling included, but with error messages that name the line and the column, explain the problem in one sentence and suggest a fix. No unexpected T_VARIABLE.

phpFarm is playable from the first line of code to a farm that runs itself:

• 17 missions so far, from the first harvest() on a single tile to the open field. All of them optional — everything they teach can also be bought straight from the skill tree
  
• A skill tree with four branches: language, tools, seeds and expansion
  
• Seven crops, each built around an idea, and three pests that eat what you leave standing
  
• An editor with syntax highlighting, autocomplete, error markers and several files at once
  
• An in-game reference for every function
  
• English and German, both complete

• The last missions of the learning path, and balancing with players who have never seen the game
  
• Then Early Access, here on Steam

There are no dates yet. We would rather name one we can keep than one we have to move — and when there is one, it will be here first. Everything above is planned, not promised.

Wishlist phpFarm. For a small game, nothing helps more: Steam uses wishlists to decide who gets to see the game, and you get a note the day it comes out.

Follow the game to get posts like this one in your Steam library.

Join the Discord. That is where the work is visible: what is being built this week, which mission is being rewritten and why. If you would like to help test, say so there.
https://discord.gg/P8gX7fGz7n

Thanks for reading. Fred says hi. Well — Fred says harvest(). It is all he knows until you teach him more.