Tutorial — Build The Drowned Bell

The Drowned Bell is a grounded dark-fantasy mystery set around Greyhaven and a ruined belfry. The finished campaign has been validator-checked, reviewed, and thoroughly human-playtested. A normal playthrough takes roughly twenty minutes.

This tutorial is the center of the Author Guide. It teaches the full workflow by building one campaign from an approved idea through implementation, validation, review, playtesting, and release evidence. The How-to, Reference, and Troubleshooting chapters remain available for experienced readers and anyone who prefers to jump directly to a specific task.

The tutorial does not begin with one enormous JSON file. You will grow one campaign through eleven chapter checkpoints, validate each meaningful stage, and inspect two deliberate failure variants.

What you will build

• A public-service town centered on Greyhaven
• Mara Vey and Brother Oren as story NPCs
• Lysa Fen as a recruitable companion
• Two linked quests
• A campaign-owned letter and world-placed satchel
• Out-of-order-safe progression
• A two-level dungeon and custom boss
• Targeted, once-only story triggers
• A milestone message box and dialogue-triggered ending
• A review package with validator and playtest evidence

What you will learn

The tutorial teaches more than field syntax. It demonstrates:

• stable namespacing,
• town centers versus service POIs,
• generic NPC appearance fallback versus custom sprites,
• ordered dialogue conditions,
• state checks versus one-time events,
• progression dependency tracing,
• what the validator can and cannot prove,
• why human playtesting must include unexpected ordering.

Prerequisites

You need:

• a desktop browser,
• a text editor,
• the public Author tools,
• the public Play runtime,
• basic familiarity with JSON objects and arrays.

You do not need to clone the game repository.

How to use the checkpoints

1. Download the checkpoint file at the beginning or end of each chapter.
2. Save it as tutorial_codex.json in your working folder.
3. Compare it with your current file rather than blindly overwriting your work.
4. Validate before importing.
5. Import the corrected file into the Author tools.
6. Launch a new local playtest when the chapter includes runtime verification.
7. Keep notes about what the validator proved and what you personally observed.

The downloadable teaching checkpoints omit large optional NPC sprite arrays so progression data remains readable. Mara uses the runtime’s deterministic NPC appearance fallback, Lysa uses her companion class template, and Chapter 8 includes a compact authored boss sprite because custom monsters do not use the NPC fallback path. The fully playtested canonical campaign remains the authority for finished presentation art.

One campaign, one namespace

Every chapter continues using tutorial_codex and the tutorial_codex: prefix. Do not create a new campaign ID for each checkpoint.

The eleven chapters

Chapter	Main addition	Primary lesson
1	Campaign shell	Identity, root shape, namespacing
2	Greyhaven	Overworld town centers and services
3	Mara and the tavern	NPC appearance, placement, and dialogue roots
4	Quest 1 and the letter	Quests, items, markers, chests
5	Broken objective reference	Reading validator errors
6	Safe letter-first progression	Current state versus event timing
7	Lysa and Quest 2	Companions and linked progression
8	Drowned Belfry and Echo Warden	Dungeons and custom bosses
9	Victory and ending	Targeted triggers and completion flow
10	Validator-clean soft lock	Reachability and adversarial testing
11	Review and release decision	Evidence, severity, and human approval

Starting state

Begin with Checkpoint 1: campaign shell, then open Chapter 1.

Checkpoints are teaching artifacts

Most checkpoints are cumulative campaign states. Chapters 5 and 10 intentionally provide broken variants for diagnosis. The final canonical payload remains the authority for the completed, playtested campaign.