Games Like Below the Bell

Hollin Cross cuts stone for a living, and under the quarry an old Order laid the town's dead in galleries for four hundred years. Now the bell has started ringing on its own. 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. You go down after them. Below the Bell is a first-person dungeon crawler on a square grid, played in real time. A monster about to strike turns yellow and you hear the blow drawn back at least a beat before it lands, so there is always a moment to step aside, turn to face it, or get the shield up. Your two hands work on their own cooldowns: a weapon in one, and a shield, a knife or a hand-bell in the other. The hand-bell rings changes, patterns of strokes and rests in time with its own toll that the Order used to keep the dead where they were laid, and each one you learn is written in a book somewhere below. Ringing takes nerve: a step, a blow or a wound breaks it off. Rounds stops the dead near you for three beats. Plain Hunt shows the path of everything that moves. Stedman brings a stopped rope back to life. The fourth change is the one your teacher never taught you. Every boss has one answer, and it is written down somewhere on its floor. Between descents you walk Hollin Cross itself, at night under the moon, to the people standing at their doors: the chapel, the smithy, Nell's lamp-shop, the Wheatsheaf. The quarry gate takes you down, and the crypt stair and the bell tower open as you go deeper. A Homeward Taper lit below brings you up to town and back down to the same spot, once. What is in it:

How generative AI was used in this game

All of the game's text, in English and in Brazilian Portuguese, was written with an AI language model under the developer's direction, and checked line by line in both languages. 412 pictures were generated with an OpenAI image model, from prompts written for this game: the monsters, the people of the town, the parts the town's houses are built from, the items, the props and walls of the floors, the skill icons, the quest pictures and the achievement emblems. Of the 661 monster animation sheets, 589 were animated with PixelLab, some of them finished by a script (the strike after an attack's wind-up, a sway added to a walk, specks cleared from a death), and 72 were drawn from the still picture by a script, with no AI model. 120 side and back views of the monsters were turned from their front pictures with PixelLab. 60 sounds were generated with ElevenLabs: the sound effects and the town's night ambience. 20 pieces of music were generated with ElevenLabs. On this store page, the key art behind the title was generated with an OpenAI image model; the title is set on it in the game's font by a script. The trailer is recorded from the game, and its music was written note by note in a script, with no AI model. No prompt names another game, studio or artist. The font is Press Start 2P, under the SIL Open Font License.