An indie game house
One bell. One game at a time — built by hand, grown in place, rung louder with every build.
Studio ident, draft v3 — the Keeper's call on the final cut is still pending. What you see here is the working version.
The studio
Deep under HollowFen, past the drowned chapel, a bronze bell hangs in the flooded mouth of the Drowned Throat. It never rings for tax or tribute — it rings when work begins. That is the whole of the studio's philosophy: start the work, and let the sound carry.
Drowned Bell Studios is a family-run indie outfit making games out of the Veriland world — a homebrew setting years in the making, with five moons, six peoples, its own tongue, and its own coin. The first title on the bench is Veriland: Seed and Sword, built in Unity with every model shaped by hand in Blender.
Games
The studio is the house; every game is a room in it. The site never needs rebuilding when game two shows up — it just grows another room.
Walk the fen-country of Veriland under five moons. The first slice opens at the HollowPhenn Inn, crosses the yard to the Hearth, and follows one quest thread: the Seed-Tither, the Khar'Zeth caravan master who deals in seeds, not taxes. One quest, finished end to end — the seed of the whole game.
Honest estimate: a playable 15–30 minute demo lands in December — twelve to sixteen sessions of one game growing in place.
No second title is in production. When the Keeper green-lights one, it takes this slot — its own pitch, its own build status, its own gallery — and the house gets bigger without a single wall torn down.
The language
Virelan is a complete language built for this world — not a decoration, not a handful of invented words sprinkled over English. It has its own script, its own grammar, and a working dictionary, and it is the tongue the game's peoples actually speak.
The Ilinar thread-letters: 22 glyphs, written as a woven thread. Every name, sign, and inscription in Veriland can be set down in them — the letters came first, and the world learned to read them.
Sentences run verb-first — the action leads, and everything else follows it. Verbs carry their tense in their endings:
The First Weaving is the working dictionary of Virelan — the word-hoard the language is spoken and written from, and the source the game's peoples speak by.
Virelan is spoken in three tones — three registers of feeling carried in how the language is voiced. Each has its own name, and each belongs to its own kind of moment.
Whispering Reverence
The hushed tone — for prayer, greeting the sacred, and speaking of what is held in awe.
Mourning
The grieving tone — for loss, remembrance, and the names of the dead.
Shadowed Anger
The darkened tone — for wrath held under control, warning, and threat spoken quietly.
Put the first two together and you get a name the studio already knows well: thal + vara forms Thalvara — “she who walks the land.”
The work album: a full work album of songs in Virelan is also being written — one long story told in the language, chapter by chapter, meant to be played straight through.
Concept art
Finished pieces from the art runs — character turnarounds for the 3D pipeline, the peoples side by side, the places, and the monsters waiting in the wings. Click any piece to look closer. Every piece carries the Cook mark in gold at its corner — the Keeper's hand, and the studio's, on all concept art that leaves this house.
Landscapes — pencil & color, notated
Environment studies of Veriland, each drawn twice — once in graphite, once in paint — and written over with the notes a modeler actually needs: materials, scale, light, and the warnings. The first two are the game's own ground, the Hearth and the HollowPhenn Inn; the rest are corners of the wider world, drawn as the map widened.
The Green Cathedral — concept set
Forty sheets, one building. The Green Cathedral is one single massive living building — a grown facade, twin living towers, a woven rose window, buttress roots doing the work of flying buttresses — not a grove, and not a ruin with trees grown through it. The set runs twenty graphite sheets against twenty color studies, view by view: exterior, approach, nave, altar, plan, elevation, and the details a modeler builds from. The later sheets carry the definitive design — where an early pass and a late sheet disagree, the late sheet is the one that gets built.
The Hearth — the true design
The Hearth is the game's opening location — the first place a player sees — and its design is now locked. Six towering living trees stand in an even ring, their crowns arching inward over the courtyard with gaps left open so sunlight still falls through onto the farm below. Living bramble walls wrap around the trees to about halfway up the trunks; bridges run tree to tree, interconnecting the ring; and the living quarters are in the trees themselves, in the trunks and the crowns. Eight notated pencil sheets, the color studies of the four main views, and three color design renders carry the whole design — the sheets to model from in Blender. Color versions of the four viewpoint pencil sheets — the farm rows, the well, the bridge, and the forest edge — are still to come.
Where the design started: the early treehouse-style readings of the Hearth, drawn before the Keeper's ruling settled the ring of six. They are kept here for the record, clearly marked — every one of them is superseded by the locked design above.
From the Keeper's own hand
Before any render, there was a sketchbook. The Keeper's own hand-drawn concept art lives here — separate from the generated sets, framed as it deserves. The frames below are reserved and ready; his scans drop straight in when he sends them.
Pencil concept art — turnarounds
Before a character is a model, it is a drawing. These are the graphite turnaround sheets — front, side, and back studies in pencil — kept as their own body of work, separate from the AAA color sheets in the gallery above. The color renders are measured against these pages, not the other way round.
The generated set is now complete — all eight sheets are drawn and mounted: the Aeldrin, Sylvari, Nyxari, and corrected Khyrrix pairs, graphite studies worked from the AAA color sheets so the designs measure the same on both walls. Two frames still stand ruled and waiting beside them — the Player and the Seed-Tither — reserved for the Keeper's own hand-drawn sheets, and his pencil alone fills them. Every sheet here takes the gold Cook mark at its corner, like every other piece in the house.
How a sheet gets here: the studio's set is drawn from the AAA sheets; the Keeper's own pencil takes frames beside them as his scans come in — graphite, smudges, construction lines and all. These pages stay pencil. If a study later earns a color pass, the color version hangs in the main gallery; the pencil original keeps its place here.
Dev log
Studio-wide, one honest stream. Progress, not promises.
The Sylvari female turnaround hanging in the gallery is now a public variant — the same character, leaf hair, bark-and-leaf gown, and vine cloak, front, side, and back, drawn in a fuller-coverage take for the public wall. The original design sheet stays where it belongs: it remains the game's reference, kept in the studio archive.
The studio's contact email is now on the page — drownedbellstudios@gmail.com — listed with the team in the contact section and in the footer, so anyone who needs the studio can reach it at one address.
The Ilinar glyph chart now hangs in the Virelan — The Language of Veriland section, full-width above the three tones — all 22 glyphs drawn from the true font, the 17 consonants with their sounds and form descriptions and the 5 vowels with their tail-marks, so visitors can see what the thread-letters actually look like.
A new section joins the site: Virelan — The Language of Veriland, set beside the game it belongs to. It lays out the language whole — the Ilinar thread-letters and their 22 glyphs, the verb-first grammar with its tense endings (-eth past, -ai future, -in command), the First Weaving dictionary, the three tones (Valer'ekai, Lun'thara, and Drakhaal'sor), and a first handful of words — thal, vara, and the greeting Vel'ta — along with a note on the Virelan work album now being written as one long story in the language.
Today's art runs land in the gallery in two new groupings. First, The Green Cathedral — Concept Set: all forty sheets, twenty in graphite and twenty in color — and the ruling stands on the wall with them: the Cathedral is one single massive living building, grown facade, twin towers, woven rose window, buttress roots, with the later sheets carrying the definitive design. Second, The Hearth — The True Design: the locked design of the game's opening location, fifteen sheets — six towering trees in an even ring, crowns arching inward with sunlight gaps over the courtyard farm, living bramble walls woven halfway up the trunks, bridges between the trees, and living quarters in the trees themselves. The four early treehouse-style Hearth pieces hang beneath it as previous ideas, marked superseded. Still to come: color versions of the Hearth's four viewpoint sheets — the farm, the well, the bridge, and the forest edge.
The last four pencil turnaround sheets are drawn and mounted — the Nyxari pair and the corrected Khyrrix pair — and the generated pencil set now stands complete at eight sheets: Aeldrin, Sylvari, Nyxari, and Khyrrix, male and female. The Player and Seed-Tither frames stay empty by design — those two are the Keeper's to draw himself.
Two walls filled in a day. The pencil turnaround wall takes its first four sheets — the Aeldrin and Sylvari pairs in graphite, palette notes and all — with the Nyxari and corrected Khyrrix pairs still on the bench. And six landscapes joined the drawing board, each in pencil and color with the modelers' notations written on: the Hearth, the HollowPhenn Inn, the Highland Pass, the Saltmere Coast, the Ember Wastes, and the Lorn Gorge.
The Keeper set his maker's mark as the house rule: gold line art — a triangle, COOK across the middle, a line straight through — stamped on all concept art, his mark and the studio's both. It's on every piece in the gallery now, and the site gained a dedicated wall for pencil turnaround sheets: front, side, and back studies in graphite, framed and waiting for the drawings.
The Keeper picked the name: Drowned Bell Studios. This site — the draft you're looking at — went up the same day for his feel-test. The logo call followed: the drowned bell is the mark, with the minimal gold bell as its small-size companion. Ident v3 still awaits his verdict.
Unity is downloaded via the Hub and Blender is installed on the Keeper's PC. Friday's 4:30 session is Inn-first: the teaching course runs Phase 0 through Phase 6 — editor tour, first-person walking, the Blender-to-Unity pipeline, light and sound, the Seed-Tither quest, the street outside, and combat last.
The Keeper ordered the game: Veriland: Seed and Sword — a Rosebud storyboard prototype and a Unity AAA build, one slice to start (HollowPhenn Inn, the Hearth, the Seed-Tither, one quest thread). The same day's art runs delivered the AAA turnaround set — Aeldrin, Sylvari, Nyxari, and the Khyrrix corrected to four-armed antlike per his spec — plus the peoples lineups and the widescreen scenery now hanging in the gallery above.
First hands-on build session: the Keeper opens Unity, and his own hand-built Inn starts replacing the grey proof room. One game, growing in place — this is where the demo's December date starts getting earned.
Alpha / Beta testers
Testing starts when there's something worth judging — a loop, not scaffolding. Two circles, in order, each with its own job.
Alpha testing begins with the Phase 4 build: the first complete quest loop — walk in first person, talk to the Seed-Tither, run the quest, finish it. From there, testers play each milestone build as it lands and answer the studio's three standing questions:
Same three questions every build, so the answers compare cleanly from one phase to the next — and the trend says whether the game is winning.
Beta testing opens once the 15–30 minute demo slice stands polished — the Hearth, the street, the Inn, and the Seed-Tither quest end to end. A wider circle gets the build then: not to find the shape of the game, but to prove the shape holds for people who didn't watch it grow.
Beta is the last gate before anything goes public. Nothing ships on the studio's say-so alone.
First tester on record: Roberta — the studio's standing playtest gate. Her verdict steers what gets built next; whether a build hooks her is the measure every phase is judged by. The remaining slots fill as the circle opens — names go in as real testers take them, not before.
Status: the testing circle opens with the Phase 4 build. Until then the roster holds at one name — Roberta's — and the slots wait.
Shop
The shop arrives when there's something real to sell. No tip jar, no pre-orders, no vapor. Here's what's on the shelf plan:
Original Veriland skins, modeled by hand in Blender and rigged in-house. Skin-only pack first — fastest to a first listing — then the rigged flagship reusing the same mesh.
Singles $9.99–$14.99 · Packs $24.99–$49.99
License rule, in plain ink: sellable means original or open-licensed only. No borrowed bases, no exceptions.
Sales run through itch.io — the studio's page opens with the first listing, not before. The site will link out to it here the day it goes live; the studio never handles payment itself.
Side money first, no rush: it pays for the filament, the table, and the next bell.
The hands
Founder · design lead
The hand behind the pencil and the final word on everything. Builds the Inn in Blender, rings the bell, decides.
Pathfinder · build & operations
Organizes, verifies, traces, and executes — the outward hand that keeps the Hearth's work moving and the builds honest.
Narrative & lore architect
Creates and develops the world itself — the peoples, the tongues, the stories the games are built from.
Contact the studio: drownedbellstudios@gmail.com
This draft is private — built for the Keeper's eyes first. Nothing here goes public until he says the word. When the studio is ready to talk to the world, the contact desk and the itch.io link take this spot.
