The free demo of the Cellarer is now available! Discover the whole of the game's first Tier: establish your first production chains, sustain the needs of your monastery, welcome new monks, produce more goods, and finally raise the monastery's first great work: the Belfry!
I've spent quite some time polishing this first Tier, and I now consider it ready to be put into players' hands. For me, this is the starting point for giving the game its first real visibility and, of course, gathering feedback on how players make their way through its first challenges.
The demo gives you full access to the first Tier of content. If that sounds interesting, give it a try and let me know how it feels: what you enjoyed and would like to see more of, but also the parts that felt less enjoyable.
The Cellarer is first and foremost a game about logistics, in which you play the cellarer, the monk responsible for provisioning the entire monastery.
Beginning with a humble cloister and a few lay brothers, you'll establish workshops and lay the paths that keep your production chains running and the monastery growing.
Adding another building is only part of a bigger picture: you still have to lay the paths that supply it with resources, and whatever it produces surely needs to reach someone else, elsewhere in the monastery. There is no abstract flow of resources between buildings: each good you see on a path is carried by a cart, pulled by a brother you have to feed, and it definitely needs to reach whoever needs it.
Paths are the puzzle. Lanes have directions, and every junction is a routing decision. A badly designed network can become congested as the monastery grows, or bring your economy to a halt if you haven't provisioned enough carts. A production chain that used to work perfectly can suddenly find itself blocked because another chain is draining all the available carts!
And speaking of carts, transport also has a human cost. Every cart requires a lay brother: one more brother you have to feed who won't be working in a workshop. Expanding production therefore isn't only about creating more chains, but also making sure the logistics network can keep up.
Ultimately, all of this serves the monastery. Production allows you to welcome more monks, supply its Offices, adopt new Customs, and expand into neighbouring lands. But only if you can manage to feed everyone, of course.
The demo covers the complete first Tier of the Cellarer, without limitation. You begin with the monastery cloister and a few lay brothers, then gradually expand your sanctuary.
A guided introduction takes you through establishing the basic economy before more monks begin joining and more advanced goods become available. That means gathering materials, building more, producing enough food for your brothers, building more, keeping the transport network reliable... and building more, probably.
As the monastery expands, you'll also have to attend to its religious obligations and make sure the Offices are supplied each day. Offices earn you Prestige, and with enough Faith you'll be able to decree new Customs to make your monastery even more efficient — and build more, most probably.
Your sanctuary must take shape as well. Some buildings need to be connected to it rather than simply placed wherever there is space, adding another constraint to the logistics puzzle — and perhaps requiring you to rework a few things along the way (in order to build more).
The final objective of the demo is the Belfry, the first edifice available in the game. Edifices are monumental buildings that cannot simply be built like other monastery extensions. They require their own, slower logistics network to carry heavy construction materials to the site and go through several construction phases, from the foundations to the main structure and finally the roof.
Completing one will probably require your entire logistics network to run flawlessly.
The Belfry marks the end of the demo, but nothing stops you from carrying on afterwards, optimising your monastery, and perhaps rebuilding the whole thing in a more optimised way!
The Belfry might mark the end of the demo, but it is meant to sit at the beginning of the Cellarer instead.
Tier I establishes the basic systems: production and logistics, workforce and food, Offices, Customs, and finally great edifices. The following Tiers will build on these foundations with more interconnected systems and increasingly complex challenges.
Production chains will become longer as the monastery grows. New resources will create dependencies between different areas, while increasing traffic will force you to design — and probably redesign — your network more efficiently.
No monk likes waiting for his bread. You thought your path layout was sufficient. It probably was. It isn't anymore.
Great edifices are the other pillar of this progression. The Belfry is intentionally a modest example: it lets the demo show a complete great work, from the first materials delivered to the finished edifice.
In the full game, that role will take on an altogether different scale with the Cathedral. The current plan is for up to five Tiers of content: its construction would begin at the end of Tier I and carry on throughout the progression, until it is completed towards the end of Tier V. Other edifices will of course still be built along the way.
What exactly each Tier will contain, and how the Cathedral progresses through them, remains open to iteration throughout development. Feedback from the demo and potential future playtests will be an important part of deciding how these systems evolve.
I'm Charlie, the developer behind the Cellarer. I've been working in the game industry for around a decade, and I've always had a strong attraction to simulation and automation games like Factorio and Satisfactory, but also to city builders with a medieval tone, such as the Anno series.
So I decided to give this mix a chance: a kind of (chill) automation game in a medieval setting!
The contrast between a medieval world and the game's IDE-ish interface might be surprising. I'm a strong believer that good UX should never be a compromise: information should be where you need it, when you need it, rather than buried behind layers of menus or abstraction.
Being a solo developer also puts constraints on what I can achieve, so the Cellarer focuses first and foremost on its mechanics rather than elaborate graphics. And since I spend much of my time staring at programming software anyway, that's naturally where some of the visual inspiration came from.
Historically, the cellarer was the monk responsible for managing the monastery's provisions and resources. He probably wasn't in charge of building workshops all over the surrounding countryside, but the term has always given me this feeling of a sort of medieval tycoon.
And what's more fun than a game where you have to create a huge interconnected graph and optimise it?
This is Devlog 00 because I see the demo release as the real starting point for publicly documenting the development of the Cellarer.
Until now, most of my time has been spent getting to a first playable version and polishing Tier I into a demo that can be played from beginning to end (and finished in a decent amount of time).
From here, I'll start developing the next major features while gathering feedback from the demo, tweaking what is already there, and making sure the game is actually fun to play.
I'm aiming for roughly two devlogs each month. Don't expect large development essays or exhaustive changelogs: I'd rather make these short snapshots of what's going on with the project, new mechanics, production chains, buildings, experiments, and whatever else I've been working on.
These devlogs will also be where I announce opportunities to test upcoming versions. As development progresses beyond the public demo and Tier I, I expect to run playtests where interested players can give feedback and help steer the development.
If you've reached the end of this devlog, I assume the game interests you!
Give the demo a try and let me know about your experience. This is the first time the Cellarer has been opened to a wider group of players, so your feedback will be really valuable in helping me determine which parts need more attention as development moves forward.
If you enjoyed the demo and want to see where the monastery goes from here, you can wishlist the Cellarer and follow the game on Steam.