Live your fantasy of being a game dev in this sim where you build an MMO, manage your team and investors, and even play your own game

Ever fantasize about making your own game? Probably. Ever fantasize about making your own game while running a development studio, managing your employees, balancing your budget, crunching to meet deadlines, getting angry texts from your studio's investors, and dealing with data breaches? Maybe not.

Let's Build a Dungeon is a new management sim just announced by Springloaded, maker of 2021's Let's Build a Zoo. In fact, in a lot of ways, Let's Build a Dungeon is based on the making of Let's Build a Zoo and Springloaded's earlier games. Check out the trailer below to see how you can design, build, and play your own MMORPG in Let's Build a Dungeon… and how that's really just the tip of the game dev iceberg.

«Recruit staff, rent an office, manage project deadlines, negotiate with shareholders, pitch to publishers for investment and undertake many more crucial tasks,» Springloaded announced today. «Take the company from a scrappy indie studio to a development powerhouse in a humorous but true-to-life take on the current games industry.»

The type of game you create in Let's Build a Dungeon is up to you, and can be anything from «a monster-catching RPG» to «a cozy farming simulator.» There's even fishing, so yes, I am absolutely going to create a fishing MMO when this sim comes out. The really cool thing is you can do more than just build the game and watch simulated players enjoy it: you can dive in and play it yourself.

I got to try a brief demo of Let's Build a Dungeon this week and it gave me a pretty tantalizing taste of running my own development studio. I began with an empty game world and used random generation to create a chunky continent for my MMO. Then I placed a few buildings of the sort you might find in a fantasy RPG: a bakery, a cartography office, a farm, plus some decorations like lamp posts and fences. But there's nothing for heroes to do without quests, so I added my first one: a merchant's cellar has been infested with giant rats and they need your