Diablo Creator Is Back, Announces A New Game – It Lurks Below

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Veteran game developer David Brevik, who designed and programmed the original Diablo, has now announced a new project that he has been working on for about a year at his indie studio Graybeard Games. The game developer has announced a new indie game – called It Lurks Below.

It Lurks Below – what we know about it

Brevik’s new game is a sandbox game and is somewhat based on Re-Logic’s Terraria, in terms of both gameplay and style, notes VentureBeat. The closed beta of the game is scheduled from Friday to Monday evening. Brevik would himself demonstrate the game this weekend via his Twitch channel. Two hundred players will be allowed to take part in the closed beta.

Screenshots of the game show a retro pixel art aesthetic. The characters in the game, who are shown with guns, are fighting monsters in gold-studded mines and defending homesteads. As of now, other details of the game It Lurks Below is not available. Brevik, however, told Polygon that the game will have a free-form building, something similar to Minecraft and Terraria.

Further, Brevik told that though he loves those games, he “wanted more of a point to a lot of those games. I wanted to make an RPG, with classes and leveling up, random items, where you get more and more powerful as you go down into the core of the world and fight baddies.”

Brevik aims to release the game on Steam later this year. The developer also has plans to port the game on more platforms going forward. It Lurks Below will come with three modes – normal mode, creative mode and permadeath mode. Players armed with melee weapons and wands will have to take on monsters with each having their own special trick – something that we have already seen in the Diablo series.

Brevik admits his inexperience with art

Initially, the veteran game developer wanted to create a much larger game. However, he later decided against it to save on time and work diligently on each aspect of the game. Brevik, a veteran in the industry, had a decade-long stint helming Blizzard North after which he founded Graybeard Games in 2016.

Though Brevik has been making games for the last twenty-five years, he admits his inexperience in making game art.

“That was the most difficult thing for me, because I’m not much of an artist,” Brevik said. “It’s definitely got a pixel retro kind of feel to it … I’ve tried to make it as dark and creepy as I can … creepy atmosphere and lighting.”

Further, he told Polygon that the game’s art took him the most time, but he is getting better at it now. He even joked about it saying that players will notice his art work improve as they dig deeper in the game.

According to Brevik, he will continue to work on It Lurks Below as the sole developer even after its release.

“I am going to be adding stuff to [It Lurks Below], listening to the community, getting feedback and making sure the game is the best it can be,” he said.

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