Open Sauce

Neotropolis is where we stress-test Alleycat with hundreds of players who already speak the fiction. Open Sauce 2026 was the opposite: explain the platform to makers who had never heard of the desert event.

Attendance jumped from roughly 10,000–20,000 the year before to about 50,000 at the San Mateo County Event Center. We showed up with six people, about 120 PDN MK II units, four FDN MK I boxes running standalone demo games, nearly 1,000 tiny handmade books to hand out, and no realistic way to run a city-wide bounty hunt. Even our full Neo field count would vanish in that crowd. Open Sauce was a demo floor, not Neotropolis at scale.

The booth ran on duels, FDN playtests, and conversation. The question we heard all weekend: "What am I looking at?" Makers, families, hackers, and curious walk-bys handled PDNs, tried Quickdraw, and poked at FDN games while we explained what we have been building for years. Neotropolis and Discord regulars kept finding the booth and jumping in to help. We are so grateful for the support of the community.

A few moments stuck: Elli dueled Josef Prusa and Alexander Chappel on PDNs, both names already in our Maker Corner, on hardware that includes Prusa-printed parts. We gave away roughly 700 of the tiny books on day one alone (we probably needed 2,000 for the whole weekend). An Alleycat from Discord also brought 3D-printed coins with QR codes which saved the day when we ran out of tiny books.

By Sunday we were wiped, and clearer on the pitch. Cyberpunk, Neotropolis, and LARP are deployments we love, not the whole identity. What we are building is an open source platform for immersive, in-person play: reskin the world, swap the game, keep the devices.

Booth math, FDN demo games, and engineering notes are on the dispatch page.