Building a Game Development Simulator With a Game Engine Inside It

Most management simulators ask players to run a business, but Let's Build a Dungeon asks them to build games.

Developed by Springloaded, the studio behind Let's Build a Zoo, the upcoming title blends studio management, RPG creation, sandbox game design, and user-generated content into what the team describes as a "game dev sim meets RPG builder." Players hire developers, manage marketing, balance gameplay systems, create quests, design worlds, and even jump inside the RPGs they build to play them themselves.

We spoke with James Barnard, Founder of Springloaded and Game Director on Let's Build a Dungeon, about simulating the realities of game development, designing multiple ways to play, building custom creation tools, optimizing an engine-within-an-engine, and the lessons learned while creating the studio's most ambitious project to date.

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.

What sort of gameplay experience can players look forward to in Let's Build a Dungeon? How did you ensure the game doesn't become boring or repetitive?

James Barnard: Something about Let’s Build a Dungeon that we’re really proud of is how many different ways to play there are. We have four different game modes that range from traditional management sim through to a game-engine-sandbox, so there really is something for everyone. In terms of expectations, players will experience exactly what it feels like to be a game developer. From navigating crunch to trying to keep investors happy - nothing is off the table.

In Campaign Mode, you manage your own in-game development studio, which is where the traditional simulation themes come in. You’ll hire a team, rent an office, manage your store pages, attend events to market your game and more. In terms of how realistic that simulation is, in Campaign Mode you basically do everything that we do at Springloaded, so it’s pretty true to life! We’re simulating a real-world economy, virtual storefront (basically our own fake version of Steam), reviews, staff morale - the works.

As you build your fantasy MMO world, you’ll see AI NPCs (or real Twitch chat viewers, if you prefer) adventure in the world you created. You design and build all the quests and fine-tune enemies, drop rates and such to make sure the game is balanced correctly and fun to play. Everything you design is also fully playable for you as the designer, so you can jump into your own game to try it out at any moment.

We’re also developing Just Build Mode - a more streamlined version of the game that replaces the company management gameplay with a greater focus on the joy of creation. This mode can be played alone or online with friends, and you progress by voting on asset unlocks, tools and perks from a randomised deck, building your success with whatever you have available.

Then we have Creative Mode, which is pretty broad in terms of gameplay, and maybe my personal favourite mode. You get to use our game-making engine within Let’s Build a Dungeon to freely write stories, mess around with UI, create your own characters and build your own games and experiences. Basically, if it exists in Campaign Mode, you can use it in your own game and modify it to your liking. We’re really excited to see what players do with all the powerful tools and freedom that Creative Mode provides.

Lastly, Dungeoneering Mode is a curated library of games and experiences made within Creative Mode. There will always be something new to experience there, even if you’re more interested in playing than building. We’re planning to include some experiences made by us to give examples of what kind of things are possible with our creative tools.

Could you tell us more about the inspirations that shaped both the mechanics and visual style of the game?

James Barnard: Let’s Build a Dungeon builds on a visual style that we’ve been working on at Springloaded for almost 15 years. If you go all the way back to our game Tiny Dice Dungeon, you can see the parallels with Let’s Build a Dungeon, from the cube-style head design for the key art characters to the weird brightly coloured monsters. It took us a few years to really find our feet in terms of our chunky-cute style, but as we moved from side view to top view we tried to keep to a style that people would recognize as ours.

It also means our art team has quite a lot of freedom when it comes to making new assets because there’s such a clear style, whether that’s for pixel art or our painted key art. 

Let’s Build a Dungeon includes some of the most detailed spritework we’ve done yet, especially in the environments and objects, so I hope players enjoy seeing the care we’ve put in as they progress through the game.

For spritework, our art team has the artistic freedom to concept and produce whatever they think works best, as long as it fits our continued visual style. If it’s a bigger piece like a pillar choice graphic, we’ll do concept sketches (see above)  to confirm the direction and composition. But for smaller items the team just jumps straight in.

As for my approach to game design and mechanics, I think game design is a lot like programming - it’s all about problem solving. What do you want the player to think about and to what level of complexity? Or, what do you want the player’s short term and long term objectives to be, and do you want them to control what those objectives are to some extent?

Thinking like this can lead to some really unique mechanical solutions - but then we have to be careful that we convey them properly to the player. As a designer I know there will always be room to improve in that regard, but Let’s Build a Dungeon really feels like my greatest achievement and the culmination of my experience designing games.

From a technical perspective, what was the development process like for Let's Build a Dungeon? Have you created any custom tools? What were the main challenges? How did you approach optimization?

James Barnard: We learned a lot about simulation games while making Let’s Build a Zoo, but we started Let’s Build a Dungeon from an almost fully blank slate. The only thing we brought across was the Path Finding system, which gave us a foundation to expand into something more complex without the need to start from scratch.

I think I could probably write a book about how Let’s Build a Dungeon fits together, as it’s essentially a game engine within a game about making games. Finding a way to make that come together in an efficient and accessible way has been complicated to say the least.

We developed a suite of custom creative tools for our own use, and ended up building a full fake Operating System to house them all so players could use them in their own games. Things like inventory editors, weapon editors, quest editors, pixel art painting tools, screen flow tools, and more. It’s funny to think that a lot of the tools we’re making are things I wish I’d had throughout my earlier career but never did - we always just muddled through with text files or half-baked editors.

Because Let’s Build a Dungeon lets players actually use the tools in-game, it gives us a great excuse to try and polish them up and make them friendly to use. 

In Creative Mode players have total control of the games they make using our Creative Tools, then get to see them brought to life by virtual NPC players. Because of this, NPCs need to understand how to do anything in a world that was fully built by our players, which is quite a challenge.

It’s really rewarding though - watching a horde of AI NPCs go and play through the quest you built for them from scratch feels crazy. It’s really coming together in ways I’d never dreamed of.  

Optimization-wise, we still have some work to do, but one big thing we did already was to dynamically build out texture atlases as the player drops things into the world. We can still optimise that by making different atlases for different things like UI, floors and structures, whereas at the moment we just build the textures as people see the elements in the game.

I think drawing is probably still our least performant part, but we have some amazing programmers who are making huge strides every day, so we’re confident that we’ll get there by launch.

What marketing or community-building efforts did you invest in before the launch, and do you have any advice to share?

James Barnard: We’re self-publishing Let’s Build a Dungeon with support from Kowloon Nights, so it’s been great to be in full control of how we share Let’s Build a Dungeon with the world. Ahead of launch we focused on trying to pinpoint the best way to succinctly describe what players can expect from the game. Because there are so many ways to play that appeal to such a broad spectrum of players, locking down that messaging came with many challenges. We landed on the tagline of ‘game dev sim meets RPG builder’, and constantly returning to that summary has helped us to keep our marketing consistent.

We also leaned into the tongue-in-cheek nature of the game, including sharing some of the true-to-life parodies inspired by the games industry that feature throughout Let’s Build a Dungeon’s Campaign Mode. Sometimes the meta nature of parodying the industry that we all work in feels a bit too real, but it has definitely helped to secure a lot of great co-marketing opportunities and showcase slots. People can relate to the experiences we’re sharing in our demos and trailers and that’s a good connection to have. Being an indie dev can be really hard, and we don’t shy away from talking about that.

My advice would be to consider your game’s audience carefully from Day 1, and consider the potential for your game to appeal to multiple different kinds of players in different ways.

We created a slower-paced gameplay trailer for the Wholesome Games showcase, and a chaotic parody of getting a game ready for a virtual in-game showcase for the PC Gaming Show (embedded at the top of this article). Two totally different experiences created within the same game, for two different audiences and both resulted in big wishlist spikes.

What's the current progress on Let's Build a Dungeon? What has been the community reception so far? What are your plans after the release? What lessons have you learned during development?

James Barnard: The reception to the announcement really took us by surprise. We’d hoped that the pre-existing Let’s Build a Zoo community would be excited about our next game and that we’d maybe bring in some new players who were interested in the games industry angle… but we didn’t expect to see so much support within the first few weeks.

We’d set our goal as surpassing Let’s Build a Zoo’s wishlist numbers before release, but we’d already exceeded that total within a month of the announcement and the number has continued to climb from there. We’ve since passed 180,000 Steam wishlists and we’re truly grateful for every single one. The Steam demo includes a taster of the three main game modes and we received a lot of positive feedback that’s helped us make the full version of the game the best it can be. If you’re doing a Steam demo, don’t sleep on the standalone demo page option - it helped us with visibility and now we’re at 500+ ‘Very Positive’ reviews, which is helping to bring in more new players.

Development-wise, things are going well and we’ve been running closed beta tests to focus on fine-tuning everything as we prepare for the upcoming release. We’re not exactly sure what launch will look like just yet, but it’s slowly starting to take shape and that’s really exciting for us to see. Finished features are being signed off and we’re responding to beta feedback to make sure everything is as intuitive as possible.

As for our plans after release - we plan on supporting Let’s Build a Dungeon for years to come. I often tell people that this is the ‘game of my life’ and I really mean it, so I want to keep adding content, features and updates long into my old age. A game like this could grow indefinitely, and as long as people want it, we’ll keep expanding it. I really want this to be a game that grows alongside our players, so as they get more experienced in developing with our tools, we keep adding things that spark their imaginations.

James Barnard, Founder and Lead Developer at Springloaded on Let's Build a Dungeon