⚔️ Warbell
MASSIVE OVERHALL INCOMING - REALISTIC GRAPHICS, 5h CAMPAIGN
Defend the keep against nightly ork sieges.
A knight holds a central castle through wave after wave of night assaults across a
five-biome island — real-time combat, an economy and upgrade tree, a town you build and
defend, inventory and consumables, villagers, wildlife, and a bloodline succession loop.
Built in Rust on Bevy 0.18.
▶ Website · ⬇ Download for Windows · Changelog
Play
- Windows: download
Warbell-Setup.msi and run it. The installer is self-signed, so Windows SmartScreen shows "Unknown Publisher" — click More info → Run anyway.
- itch.io: miskibin.itch.io/warbell — Windows & Linux builds, pushed automatically on every release (works with the itch.io app for auto-updates).
- From source (any platform): see Build from source below.
Controls
- WASD / arrows move · Space jump · Shift sprint · LMB attack · RMB block
- V / the HUD FP button — toggle first-person view
- E contextual interact — walk up to the keep (upgrades), a merchant stall (shop), the
war bell (ring in the night), or a chest (open it) and a prompt names it
- B build mode — at your town, press B, then point and click to raise houses, farms,
woodcutters and mines
- K gather your militia / stand down · J current situation · H controls and help
- Tab / I satchel · Q eat food · Y / T quick-slots · Z / X / C combat arts
- F forage / rescue · R recruit · ` (backquote) free-roam fly-cam · P / Esc pause
- F1 debug tuning panel · F2 perf/state overlay · 1–5 swap biome patch
Your first three days
There is no countdown during the first three preparations: ring the war bell with E when
ready. The gold compass marker shows the current destination. You can try other approaches or
ring the bell before finishing the suggested preparation.
- Gather the militia, free the nearby captives and bring the town back to work. A farm counts
when a villager is actually producing food there.
- Prepare for torch raiders targeting the farms. Buy a useful upgrade or intercept them yourself;
clearing their marked staging camp prevents the torch bearers joining that night.
- Decide how to face shamans: raid their marked camp to remove them from the incoming wave, or
prepare ranged defenses and face them at home.
Later days bring back the preparation countdown and mix these threats. The day report states
what is coming and what a successful raid changes. Ruined producers stop working; E at their
remains rebuilds them. Existing saves keep their progress and resume without replaying the lessons.
Build from source
cargo run # build + open the game window
cargo test # run the crates/core parity tests (the validation spec)
cargo check # type-check without the (slow) link
On a fresh Linux box you need Bevy's system libraries once before the first build:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y \
libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev libudev-dev libasound2-dev
(macOS / Windows need none of this.) The first build is slow — bevy compiles at
opt-level = 3 even in dev so the scene isn't single-digit FPS — but incremental rebuilds of
src/ are fast.
Architecture
Two crates:
crates/core (tileworld_core) — pure, deterministic, zero-dependency game logic
(f64 throughout). Pathfinding (A*), the wave director, upgrade / buff / resource /
inventory stores, ork & animal config, factions, RNG, the shop catalog. This is the
unit-tested validation spec — cargo test runs it. No Bevy, no I/O, no rendering.tileworld_bevy_forest (root src/) — the Bevy app: rendering, ECS systems, input, the
scene. It imports tileworld_core for all the numbers/logic that must stay correct, wrapping
core's stores as Resources (PlayerRes, Bank, Inventory, …).
Each src/<feature>.rs is a self-contained Plugin; main.rs is the assembly list — read
it as the table of contents. The whole world-sim is gated behind a freeze-gate state machine
(game_state.rs): opening any panel or leaving Playing freezes the sim but keeps rendering.
See CLAUDE.md for the full conventions (coordinate frame, despawn-race rules,
mesh-building contract, combat-number parity) and docs/superpowers/specs/ for the
per-subsystem roadmap and design docs.
Screenshot harness
The Bevy window can't be captured externally, so visuals are verified via a render-and-exit
harness:
# PowerShell
$env:FOREST_SHOT="shot.png"; cargo run
# bash
FOREST_SHOT=shot.png cargo run
It renders ~90 frames so lighting/IBL settle, saves the PNG, and exits. Stage the shot with
env vars read at startup: FOREST_CAM / FOREST_TIME (camera pose / time-of-day),
FOREST_BIOME (boot into a biome), FOREST_WAVE / FOREST_DEFEND=1 (stage a night siege),
FOREST_MENU=1 (start screen), FOREST_PANEL=tree|inv|build (open a UI panel),
FOREST_FP=1 (first-person), FOREST_EQUIP="sword_gold,gold_armor" (equip items on the hero).
BEVY_ASSET_ROOT points at this dir if you run the binary from elsewhere.
License
Warbell's source code is source-available under the
PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 — read, build, run, modify, and share it for
non-commercial purposes; commercial use is reserved. The assets under assets/ carry
their own terms (e.g. game-icons.net icons under CC BY 3.0, the
Cinzel / EB Garamond fonts under the SIL Open Font License; audio and other art may be
separately licensed). The hero's light sword combo is retargeted from
Quaternius' Universal Animation Library 2
(CC0). See LICENSE for the full text and the asset note.
