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If you've ever wanted to play your own MMORPG, the upcoming indie game Let's Build a Dungeon should be on your wishlist. From the developers behind Let's Build a Zoo, Let's Build a Dungeon is a management sim not dissimilar to Stardew Valley, but instead of running a farm, you're running a game studio.
Instead of raising crops and livestock, you recruit and manage game developers, manage development schedules and advertising strategies, and make tough decisions about when to release your project, whether it needs to be delayed, and whether you should "bow to community requests, or stay true to your creative vision."
In Let's Build a Dungeon, you're at the top of a fledgling MMORPG studio, and it's up to you to build a compelling-enough fantasy world that you maintain an active player base, but you also have to balance the books. The game gives you the tools to design quests, towns, monsters, and dungeons all tailored to your virtual players' demands. And at any point, you can hop into your own game and see the game you built from a player's perspective, and while you're there, you can ban unruly users who aren't respecting the rules you built into the game.
"Will you build a monster catching RPG? A cozy farming simulator? Or maybe a magic-fueled action adventure? Whatever you build, build it your way with thousands of objects, environments, characters and enemies to choose from," reads the game's Steam description. "Place every tree, build every quest and decide on job classes for visiting virtual players as you watch them explore in real time."
If anything, it sounds like Let's Build a Dungeon could help you sympathize with community managers and engineers working on your favorite live-service game. Developer and publisher Springloaded says you'll need to manage minute elements of your game like drop rates and enemy stats to make sure players aren't struggling too much with the XP grind. Even more harrowing, "the more time spent in your world, the happier your investors will be."
The main goal, as with any MMO studio, is to attract more players by expanding the in-game world and designing new and compelling quests, items, environments, and mechanics. There's also a strategic element to the management sim in which you're responsible for negotiating with shareholders, staff, players, and publishers to make sure your studio's keeping everyone happy.
Creative mode is an open sandbox where you can write your own story, dialogue, and cutscenes, and draw characters and adjust gameplay mechanics from whole cloth. It's here that you can upload your game into the in-game browser and check out games made by other players online.
If this game lives up to its promise, it could be a genuinely insightful demo of what it's like to be a game developer. After all, Springloaded says the idea of the game came from a desire to give a "glimpse into our past 12 years of developing games as an indie studio."
There's no release date for Let's Build a Dungeon just yet, but you can sign up for the yet-undated beta here.
In the meantime, here are all of the upcoming indie games to keep on your radar.
