Gnoblins: Shattered Dungeons announced

And by “announced,” I mean “was in development for three years and only just became available for the public to play in an unfinished pre-alpha state one month ago.” Gnoblins: Shattered Dungeons is a 3d, first-person dungeon-crawler with procedurally generated caverns to explore and a home base to stock full of hired minions.

The central idea behind this game intrigues me: “This is strategy role playing game with a strong focus on managing a small community of minions while exploring a dungeon in the first person perspective.” In short, it sounds a lot like playing Dungeon Keeper with the Possess spell permanently on.

Have a look at the list of features (most of which are evidently disabled in the playable pre-alpha):

• Explore as warrior unknown dungeons and fight dangerous dungeon dwellers.
• Craft your own items to help you to survive in a hostile environment (disabled).
• Get your pet to help you on your journey (disabled).
• Hire and manage a small group of minions (disabled).
• Build your own dungeon for you and your minions (disabled).
• Utilize the dungeon generator to explore ever changing challenges (disabled).
• Sound (disabled).

Developer Michael Stachorski says that creating this game is a hobby, but as you can see from the video above, it’s looking awfully slick–particularly so given that it’s still in pre-alpha. You can try out the open pre-alpha for free right here. Be warned, however: it’s Windows-only, and carries some hefty system requirements. No word yet on a prospective release date.