The management game progression chart is supposed to go: zoo, then theme park, then hospital, then school. Apparently no one told Springloaded Software, who are following up their 2021 tycoon 'em up Let's Build A Zoo with a game about building an MMO. Let's Build A Dungeon marries the business aspects of Game Dev Tycoon with a more hands-on approach to constructing your company's game, and there's a first trailer below.
Players will need to hire designers, coders and testers to staff their development studio, but also place buildings and trees to populate the fantasy game-within-a-game, as well as filling dungeons with traps and chests to keep virtual players busy and happy and paying their monthly subscription. I feel like the quintessential management game anecdote is making the chips more salty in Theme Park so that customers would buy more soda - whether or not that was actually possible in the game - and I hope something similar is true of Let's Build A Dungeon. I want to make the final dungeon boss incredibly difficult to defeat so that players never feel as if they've truly finished the game, until we've added a new dungeon with a new hard boss, and then we can go back and nerf the old one.
Apparently you can playtest your RPG to experience it as an actual player would, and there's enough of an toolset here that you can also create your own story, dialogue and cutscenes, then share your creation with other real players to try. Wild. You'll find more screenshots of Let'.