CARILLON

A tower defence whose towers never shoot.

You do not place guns. You hang bells. Every bell sounds a ring on the metronome, and the ring spreads out across the valley.

Where two rings touch, a spark is born. The spark is the only thing in this game that does damage.

Nothing on this board has a range, a target, a cooldown or a projectile. The whole weapon is the intersection of two circles, which means everything the genre normally tunes with numbers is expressed here as geometry you can see and plan against.

Placement is aiming

Two bells that ring together have rings of the same size, so every place they can touch lies on the straight line halfway between them. That faint gold line is drawn for you. Hang your bells so it crosses the road, and the procession walks through it.

Two bells that ring a beat apart have rings of different sizes, so their line bows into a curve instead. That is not a fault to avoid. A bowed chord reaches places a straight one cannot, and one of your three interventions exists to bow one on purpose.

The second system, and the part that surprises people

A damper walks the road carrying wet felt, and every bell it passes close to slides off the beat. A bell off the beat has its chords bow away from where you aimed them. So taking damage in this game degrades your geometry rather than a hit point bar, and repairing it costs one of the small number of actions you get per wave.

Here is the part that is not obvious. If every bell drifts by the same amount, nothing bends at all. Two bells that are both a half beat late still have equal rings and a perfectly straight chord between them. Only the difference between two bells matters. That is why the felt hurts most when it catches one bell of a pair and misses the other, and it is why tuning a single bell inside a battery that has all drifted can make things worse.

Four metals

• Bronze rings every two beats. The founder's metal, middling in every direction.
• Iron rings on every beat and dies close to home. Short chords, twice as many of them.
• Silver rings every three beats. Slow, enormous, and heavy enough to open a Shell.
• Lead barely hurts anything. Everything its sparks touch walks slower.

Metals with different periods only agree on the beats their periods share, so a bronze and a silver bell make a straight chord once every six beats and a curved one the rest of the time. You will notice that before you plan around it.

Losing costs you the siege, never the foundry

Walkers that reach the gate cost you resolve. At zero the siege ends, you keep every bloom you earned, and you spend it in the foundry on longer ropes, heavier clappers, a truer beat and one more intervention per wave. You never start from nothing twice, and the game autosaves after every single action, so closing the tab costs you nothing.

What it is

• Free, in your browser. No account, no install, nothing to download.
• Twelve waves, roughly forty minutes for a first siege, and a real ending.
• Mouse only. Keys 1, 2 and 3 arm the interventions if you want them.
• About half a megabyte in total. One HTML file, six small scripts, six PNGs, fourteen OGGs.
• No framework, no bundler, no minification. The source ships raw and readable on purpose.

The sound is the mechanic

A bell is an inharmonic partial stack, which is a thing you can synthesise from arithmetic, so every bell on the board sounds its own metal's note when it rings, on the metronome. The music you hear is literally the state of your battery. The theme underneath is a twenty four second loop in the same four pitches the four metals ring at, which is why a working peal is in tune with it.

All of the audio is procedural synthesis written by hand, not a generative model, so it is our own and it needs no attribution from anyone.

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Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Free to play, free to stream, free to write about. Made with AI assistance and disclosed on this page; the audio is procedural synthesis rather than a generative model, which is a distinction itch.io draws itself. Every file's provenance is in CREDITS.txt inside the build.