Ledgers of a Settlement is a labor of love born out of classic RPG nostalgia and years of solo craft under Spellhex Studios — a studio name paying tribute to Elwindzer, an old tabletop wizard from my gaming days who was the dark counterpart to a legendary archmage and specialized in spells with lasting effects. Growing up, I loved the early Dragon Warrior / Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games, especially Pioneer Town in Dragon Warrior IV, where you watched a settlement grow as you progressed through the story. I always wanted a game that took that growing-town feeling and turn-based combat even further: they did good, and now I'm out to do it better.
Back in 2019, while playing a tabletop d20 campaign at my friend's hobby and TCG shop, Ashenjugg, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, our party started directing how our base-camp village, Haven, grew between adventures. I tracked Haven in a Notepad file first, then built a massive spreadsheet with buttons that calculated all the weekly changes. By 2021 it had outgrown what a spreadsheet could hold, so I stopped playing tabletop and started building Ledgers of a Settlement solo as a 2D game in Unity — remaking the parchment-scroll ledger look from a very old GeoCities webpage I used to run.
After years of building the 2D foundation and testing out what Grok Bot could do, I brought Grok Bot in to take the leap from 2D into full 3D. Now, when the king claims a wild valley and sends you on a quest to tame it, you watch your town rise in 3D from humble farms up to 60-foot stone walls and defend it on a 3D tactical battlefield.
— Jamie, Spellhex Studios · Green Bay, Wisconsin
