How Bellwright Balances Fun and Realism

Bellwright is a hybrid survival and town management game that incorporates core elements from both genres: managing hunger, shelter, and food on the survival front, while recruiting, housing, and managing a growing population of citizens is the bulk of its managerial side—along with some confrontational conflict resolution against neighboring hostile groups. Survival games are often rooted in realism: humans get hungry, and so the player character ought to, as well. This relationship often invites discussion about how realistic a survival game actually i s or ought to be.

In an interview with The Best War Games, Bellwright project lead Florian “chadz” Hoffreither and lead gameplay developer Sergii “serr” Greben spoke about the role realism plays in their game. While Bellwright may sometimes have features that feel realistic, realism for the sake of it is something the team explicitly avoided. Instead, the primary goal was to promote a grounded feeling for the player as a participant in the world, and to highlight the importance of each member of their growing community.

Split image of a personal shack and a bookseller in Bellwright

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Bellwright Never Uses Realism to Justify Game Design

Realism and the game’s interactions continue to be a topic of internal discussion for Bellwright’s developers during its stint in Early Access, occasionally arising to heated arguments about how a feature should be implemented. Underneath it all, the team has stood by the core principle that realism should never be the justification for a design. Hoffreither elaborated on this, pointing to how death by starvation—a staple in many popular survival games—has been downplayed in Bellwright:

“We had arguments—not physical fights!—but real debates about stuff like, what is survival in our game? Is town-building a survival mechanic? Do we have a switch for that, or is it a gradient? Is the world moving while you’re outside your town? Can people stop by your town while you’re off doing quests?

These are things players don’t see in the final game, but they absolutely shaped how it feels to play. They fundamentally changed the gameplay experience.

For example, one conscious decision we made was that your villagers rarely starve to death. That was very intentional—we didn’t want players to feel pressure like, Oh no, I need to be back before 7 p.m. Or my people will die. That’s not fun.”

Players only see the final result, but each mechanic in Bellwright has been the subject of much internal debate. Hoffreither pointed to storage and inventory management as another hot topic, with its current iteration being the result of a successful argument in its favor. Hoffreither noted that players often take certain designs for granted, and to his point, it’s difficult to imagine Bellwright’s inventory management working any other way than it does now.

Bellwright Emphasises the Importance of Community

Image of a craftsman at a craftsman hut in Bellwright

Although it’s a realistic outcome, the fact that the player is no more powerful than the average NPC is rooted in the team’s goal for a grounded, immersive experience. Additionally, it’s to drive home the importance of the player’s citizens as members of the community. Hoffreither mentioned that this is also why players must place each piece of a structure individually in Bellwright:

“The reason I pushed for this approach was to reinforce the idea that you, as the player, aren’t special. You don’t have more health or abilities than your soldiers or companions. You’re not better than them. The only thing you have is the power of your people—the people you hire or who choose to join your cause.

That was one of the most important aspects to me. I wanted the first buildings to feel a little tedious because it reinforces the point that you aren’t the one doing everything. The people around you are.

We debated whether or not we should forbid players from doing it, but no, that’s the wrong move. The player needs to understand the value of their companions, and they need to see that those companions are actually logical and have real value.”

With passionate thought behind each decision, and an Early Access period open to player feedback, Bellwright has all the right tools to become the game its developers and players hope to see.

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