CLERESTORY

Build it as high as the stone allows.

CLERESTORY is a free cathedral incremental that plays in your browser. You are the lodge of masons raising a church over generations, bay by bay, from bare ground to a consecrated spire.

Height is fame. Fame brings pilgrims, and pilgrims are the money. One tall vault earns about a quarter more than two short ones of the same height, so height pays, and height is the danger.

But a vault pushes its walls outward, and the higher you turn it the harder it pushes. What holds it is the wall's own mass and the buttress you build against it. The panel shows both numbers side by side. If thrust wins, the bay takes strain every season, the cracks run down the stone, and at full strain the vault comes down. You lose the vault, a quarter of the wall, its glass and any flying buttress; half the fallen stone comes back, and the rest of the church stands. Nothing ever sends you back to the start.

The trades you keep making

• Glass. Glazing a bay lets in light, and light is fame, but opening the wall takes mass out of it. The most beautiful bay is the weakest one.
• Rebuilding. When the lodge has learned better arches, take an old vault down and raise the bay higher. It earns nothing until it is vaulted again.
• The seasons. Mortar will not set in winter, and winter gales push hard on the high walls.
• The lodge book. Fourteen pages: masons, carts, the pointed arch, bar tracery, the winter lodge, a treadwheel crane, the quarry road, the rib vault, stained glass, the flying buttress, pinnacles, the west towers, a relic, and the spire. Each page names the exact number it moves.
• Succession. Your Master of Works grows old and dies. You choose between two apprentices, and each changes one rule of the lodge.

Every bay draws its own window

Each bay's clerestory tracery is generated from its own seed and saved with your church: five head motifs, two to four lights, and a transom on some, so the nine windows of one church are rarely alike.

How to play

Tap or click a bay, then RAISE WALL, BUTTRESS, TURN VAULT, GLAZE. Keyboard: arrows pick a bay, W raise wall, B buttress, V vault, G glaze, L lodge book, F speed, P pause, M sound. Plays on desktop and on phones, in landscape or portrait.

It saves itself every season and whenever you leave. The lodge keeps working while you are away, closed or in another tab, for up to fifteen minutes, and never makes a choice for you. A church takes about forty minutes at normal speed, a quarter of that at 4x.

Credits and disclosure

Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Code and text were written with AI assistance. Every image in the game is generated procedurally by code written for it; the cover was made with an image model. Sound effects and music are synthesised procedurally from code, with no generative audio model. Type: IM Fell English SC and Alegreya Sans, under the SIL Open Font License.

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