{"id":176,"date":"2026-11-02T00:51:18","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T00:51:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/petersen-projects.com\/?p=176"},"modified":"2026-11-02T00:51:18","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T00:51:18","slug":"below-the-bell-a-real-time-dungeon-crawler-out-on-4-november","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/petersen-projects.com\/?p=176","title":{"rendered":"Below the Bell, a real time dungeon crawler out on 4 November"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Below the Bell<\/a> comes out on Steam on 4 November. It’s a first person dungeon crawler on a square grid, like A Light in the Gloam, but this time you go down alone and the fights happen in real time, right in the corridor you’re standing in. After Gloam I wanted to keep the grid and the automap and make something closer to the old action RPGs, where one person goes down under a town, floor after floor, and it gets worse the deeper you go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hollin Cross is a quarry town, and under the quarry an old Order buried the town’s dead in galleries for four hundred years. Now the bell started ringing by itself, and every night somebody in town hears their own name in it and in the morning they go down. You were taught to ring by the last ringer above, so you go down after them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A Restless Dead winding up a blow, with the sound shown as a subtitle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

How it plays<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The world runs on a beat, 0.6 seconds at the normal pace. Monsters walk and attack on that beat, and you move on your own time. Before a monster hits you it turns yellow and you hear the blow drawn back at least a beat before it lands, so you always have time to step aside, turn to face it or raise your shield. The blow goes to the square you were in, so if you leave the square it misses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You have two hands with their own cooldowns, a weapon in one and a shield, a knife or a hand-bell in the other. The hand-bell is your magic. You ring changes, which are patterns of strokes and rests, and each one you learn is written in a book somewhere below. Rounds stops the dead near you for three beats, Plain Hunt shows you everything that moves and Stedman brings a stopped rope back to life. Ringing is risky because a step, a blow or a wound breaks it off, and every boss has one answer that is written somewhere on its floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between descents you walk around Hollin Cross at night and talk to people at their doors, like the chapel, the smithy, Nell’s lamp-shop and the Wheatsheaf. This game has 12 floors in three acts, 3 optional floors and one more for anyone who comes back, 49 kinds of monsters, 11 bosses, 24 quests and 4 endings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Hollin
Hollin Cross at night, where you take quests and buy what you need between descents<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If real time isn’t your thing we have Step mode, where the world only moves one beat each time you act, so it plays like a turn based crawler. There’s also a Story mode where you take a third of the damage. Neither of them locks anything, every achievement and every ending still counts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What came from A Light in the Gloam<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I didn’t want to start from zero, so I took every part of Gloam that didn’t care about turns: moving on the grid, building the floors, the automap, saves and settings, the Steam layer, keyboard and controller input with rebinding, and the scripts that make the store pictures and the trailer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The way the content is made also stayed the same. Monsters, items, floors, quests and every line of text are written by Python scripts into data files that the game reads, and almost nothing is placed by hand. The tests came along too. In Gloam most of my checks were there because I found something broken by accident, so this time I started with them: every ability does something when you use it, every relic can be found by some route, every stat on an item is really used by the fight, and every line in both languages has to fit in its box, because Portuguese is always longer than English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I didn’t take is the content. No monster, item or floor comes from Gloam, it’s all new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What changed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The big change is time. In Gloam the fights are turn based on their own screen with a party of three. Below the Bell has no battle screen, the monster is in the square in front of you and that’s the fight. So most of the fight code is new, and I split it in two parts. The simulation runs in whole milliseconds with no graphics, and the game just shows what happened. This way a test can play a floor with no window open and get the same result every time, and I also have a test that plays the same fight in real time and in Step mode and checks that both end the same way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of that I could make a bot that plays the whole game, from the first floor to the last boss. It clears each floor, dodges every blow it sees coming, answers each boss with the right change and sells what it doesn’t need between floors. Every time I run the tests, three bots go down at the same time and at least two of them have to reach the end. If a floor can’t be finished, they all stop there and the tests fail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The Hour Keeper, one of the bosses that got a lot harder during testing<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The bell took a while to get right<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At the start a bell tolled on every beat, so you could count it. After playing for a while it got really tiring to hear, so I moved it to every second beat, then every third, and then I removed the background bell completely. Now the hand-bell keeps its own time when you start ringing, and the great bell only tolls when nothing is fighting you, deep and slow, with some dust falling from the ceiling. When it’s quiet you can also hear the dead whispering a count between the tolls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making it hard<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first versions were too easy. Gear could heal you all the time, so I stopped looking at my health, and I killed the Hour Keeper in three hits. Now health from gear only comes back after a fight, shrines save but don’t heal, every floor has two and a half to three times more monsters, and the deeper bosses are faster and follow you after you dodge. Some of them also sweep three squares, so a sidestep isn’t enough anymore. We also have elites, monsters with a colour and a trait like Swift, Nailed or Hulking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tried Normal, Hard and Brutal, and in the end I kept only one set of rules, the hard one. Players dodge, so the bot dodges too, and it still has to finish the game with the same rules you play. If you want it easier, that’s what Step mode and Story mode are for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A Nailed Censer Bearer, one of the elites, with more of the dead behind it<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I also made a test menu, only in my own builds, that starts any floor with the level, gear and changes you’d normally have when you get there. That way I could play the last floors on my Steam Deck without playing the whole game first. Playing on the Deck is also how I found out you couldn’t type the Ringer’s name with a controller, so the game has its own on-screen keyboard now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The texts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Like Gloam, the whole game is in English and Brazilian Portuguese, written together. After the game was finished I went through every line again, twelve rounds so far, checking each one against what the game really does. A draught said it healed twice what it really did, a trap message didn’t say which monster stepped in it, and one crossbow came out of the loot as the Heavy Heavy Crossbow. Sometimes the text was wrong and sometimes the game was, and I fixed whichever one it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Below the Bell on Steam<\/a>, for Windows, out on 4 November. If it looks like your kind of game, a wishlist helps a lot, and if you play it and something reads wrong or doesn’t work like it says, please let me know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Below the Bell comes out on Steam on 4 November. It’s a first person dungeon crawler on a square grid, like A Light in the Gloam, but this time you go down alone and the fights happen in real time, right in the corridor you’re standing in. After Gloam I wanted to keep the grid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/petersen-projects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/petersen-projects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/petersen-projects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersen-projects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersen-projects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/petersen-projects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178,"href":"https:\/\/petersen-projects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions\/178"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersen-projects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/petersen-projects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersen-projects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersen-projects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}