Three Bells: Village Simulator

Who are the players? Three Bells is for players who enjoy approachable settlement management, visible growth, and making meaningful decisions under pressure. It targets short play sessions while offering enough systemic depth for players who like optimizing workers, resources, defenses, and village layouts.

What is the game? Three Bells is a portrait-oriented medieval village simulation. The player establishes a hamlet around a church, constructs homes and workplaces, assigns villagers to jobs, and develops resource chains for food, building materials, weapons, and armor. Villagers are both the workforce and the militia. Periodically, bandits approach the settlement. The player must decide when to ring the church bell, interrupting production and rallying villagers to defend their home. Poor preparation can leave the village hungry, overcrowded, undefended, or destroyed.

What does the prototype contain? The prototype contains a complete real-time settlement loop. Players can place, upgrade, relocate, staff, and demolish buildings. Villagers gather resources, transport materials, operate production buildings, construct roads and walls, and respond visibly to their assignments. The generated world includes terrain, rivers, bridges, forests, harvestable resources, wildlife, navigation, day-and-night lighting, weather, music, sound effects, and escalating raids. Trees create strategic lanes and can be permanently cleared for expansion. Players can build defensive walls, gates, and towers, or equip villagers with arms and armor. Population growth depends on food and available housing. Raids increase in strength after each victory. The session ends if the population is lost or the church falls, while surviving a raid provides a clear victory milestone and allows the settlement to continue growing.

Future-state vision The future version would deepen the relationships between terrain, settlement planning, and defense. Larger maps would support distinct districts, specialized production chains, more building upgrades, varied enemy tactics, and additional defensive options. Villagers would gain individual traits, skills, equipment, relationships, and persistent histories. Seasonal pressures, trade, fires, disease, morale, and competing needs would create new stories without replacing the readable core loop. The long-term goal is a living settlement where every expansion changes both the economy and how the village survives its next crisis.