Let’s Build a Dungeon gives players the developer’s dilemma — Early Access launches February 2027

Singapore studio Springloaded has spent three years building a game that asks you to do what they do every day. The frame is elegant and a little vertiginous: you are the game designer, and the thing you are designing — a massively multiplayer RPG built from the ground up — is itself chasing an Early Access release. The meta loops are intentional.

Campaign Mode is the core of Let’s Build a Dungeon, and it is where the design argument lives. You run a studio: hiring and firing, balancing loot tables, responding to a community of virtual players. The game tracks your decisions through a development pipeline — concept, CEO call, asset production, implementation — and eventually drives you toward a launch on something called “GameLink Early Access,” the game’s in-fiction parody of real-world Early Access programmes. The fictional release and the real one mirror each other almost exactly, which is either a sleight of hand or the most honest statement about indie development an independent studio has committed to screen.

“By allowing players to mimic the real-life development cycle of Let’s Build a Dungeon within the game, we’re making good on our commitment to show players what game development is really like,” said James Barnard, studio founder and game director. “In the exact same way that our players need to adapt to the feedback of their virtual players to succeed in Campaign Mode, we know that we need to do the same.” Barnard describes the result as a “symbiotic relationship” — the real studio and the fictional one feeding back into each other, each shaped by community response.

The game organises itself around four distinct modes. Campaign Mode sits at the deepest end of the simulation, tracking your studio across sprints, milestones, and hard CEO decisions. Just Build Mode offers low-pressure world-building through a deck-building system. Creative Mode is a full open sandbox. Dungeoneering Mode opens curated experiences from Springloaded, other developers, and the wider community. A Twitch integration layer lets viewers enter the game as virtual players and vote on key studio decisions, extending the feedback loop into the broadcast.

Top-down pixel-art RPG world in Lets Build a Dungeon — Image: Springloaded

Springloaded is the Singapore-based studio James Barnard founded in 2012, following a career that included lead design credits at LucasArts. The studio’s previous title, Let’s Build a Zoo, was critically acclaimed for the same quality of simulation — management as craft, genre as a way of thinking through what making something costs. The new game extends that lineage into something that feels more candid. The title has cleared 195,000 wishlists, and a playable demo is available now on Steam and the Windows Store in more than ten languages.

Let’s Build a Dungeon launches into Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview on February 11, 2027, for PC, in partnership with publisher Kowloon Nights. Springloaded intends to develop the game throughout that period toward a full 1.0 release — incorporating player feedback along the way, which is, if you have been paying attention, precisely the point.

Tags: James Barnard, Kowloon Nights, Let’s Build a Dungeon, PC Gaming Show, Springloaded, Early Access games