Bedem — a Turn-Based Hex Strategy Game from Slavic Folklore

Autumn 1797. On the edge of the Military Frontier stands a line of wooden watchtowers right by the forest. By day it is an ordinary border, with frontier guards, sentries and villages behind them. When darkness falls, something comes out of the forest that the villages only speak of in whispers. Bedem is a turn-based strategy game on a hex map about the people who hold that line until morning, night after night. It is the studio's own game, from the idea and the rules to release on Google Play and Apple's App Store.

The game belongs to the school of classic wargames like Panzer General, but the enemy is not an army: it is the creatures of Slavic folklore. Day belongs to the player: companies, iron, discipline and fires to light and guard. At dusk the lairs wake, and at night the map turns. You see only as far as your fires reach, creatures move faster, and companies far from the light lose their nerve and start to run. Every unit has two bars, strength and morale, so a battle is lost not only when men fall but also when they break.

• 16 missions in two campaigns: the autumn Cordon and the Winter Cordon, with snow that keeps tracks, ice that fire melts, blizzards and a forest that grows towards the villages
• A night cycle: a day to prepare, a night in which you see only as far as your fires, and a dawn that finally shows where the things moving in the dark have gone
• Creatures from Slavic folklore: the vukodlak, the mora, the drekavac, the psoglav, the štrigun, the drowned dead, the vjedogonja, the whirlwind and finally Morana herself, each with its own rule and its own weakness
• Named heroes: a harambaša, a krsnik, a smuggler, a Glagolite scribe, a zduhač, a wise woman, Stjepan the smith and Mara the kresnica, each with their own abilities. A fallen hero stays dead for the rest of the campaign
• Three difficulty levels, a clear forecast before every attack and an undo for movement, so the game punishes bad decisions but not accidental taps
• Dark ink-and-wash scenes, music written for each mission on gusle and tambura, and Latin prayers when the priest or the wise woman heals the wounded
• No internet, no ads, no account: the game collects no data and plays in English and Croatian
• The first three missions are free, then a single €4.99 purchase unlocks both campaigns, with no subscription

I ran the whole cycle: the rules and the night mechanic, the story and the world, sixteen hand-built missions, balance checked against thousands of simulated games, the art direction and the interface, sound and music, native Android and iOS wrappers with in-app purchases, screenshots and copy for both stores, and trailers in English and Croatian.

Technologies: game — HTML5 and JavaScript in a single file with no external dependencies, plus a custom balance simulator. Android — a Java WebView wrapper with Google Play Billing. iOS — Swift, WKWebView and StoreKit 2, for iPhone and iPad.

Download on the App Store (iOS) Get it on Google Play (Android)