Please introduce your team. How did the development of Let’s Build a Dungeon begin?
James Barnard, Founder and Lead Developer: I founded Springloaded in 2012. We’re an indie studio based in Singapore made up of a collection of people who love bringing simulation games to life. Most of our team are from Singapore, but we have a smattering of global citizens from across the world including from the UK, Poland, USA, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and more – making us a pretty diverse team.
We previously made zoo tycoon sim Let’s Build a Zoo, and now we’re developing Let’s Build a Dungeon – a game dev simulator meets RPG builder. It started out as a “what if we could make anything” kind of thought experiment and we went from there. It was a lot of different ideas coming together in a short period of time that ended up as a pretty well-formed design. Maybe, knowing what I know now, we should have aimed to make something a little smaller in scope!
Right after we released Let’s Build a Zoo on PC, people started approaching us about what we were going to make next. A lot of publishers were suggesting that we do the obvious and make something very similar but with a different theme, because it would supposedly make us a lot of money. I am a terrible business person, so doing something safe did not appeal to me at all. I know it was a privileged position to be in to receive that kind of interest, but we ended up politely declining those requests and instead sent out a deck detailing something a bit different – something much bigger in scope than anything we’d done before
I love the games industry, and I feel like the development of every game has a great story behind it. I get such a kick from going to events and meeting people who tell me about the things they went through to make games. I started thinking about how people outside the industry would also find the emotional rollercoaster of game development really interesting, and that’s where the concept started to take shape. Let’s Build a Dungeon is, fundamentally, a game about making games.