Cavedesign

Cavedesign is a minigame released in Trollquest. Originally intended as a mere proof of concept, its popularity convinced SN Entertainment to further develop it and make it a full game. It was publicly released on August 16th 2015.

In Cavedesign, players have the possibility to build and explore constructions; initially restricted to caves, players' creativity quickly allowed all kinds of building to be built.

As of September 2015, it is SNE's second biggest success with a total of 20 million copies sold.

=Gameplay= Much like Trollquest, Cavedesign is a game with no specific goal. It's an | open world game, allowing the players to accomplish anything they want. Although it was first advertised as a construction minigame, the amount of freedom in the game made the players explore other aspects. The game being easy to add modifications to, many game modes co-exist throughout the community. Some of them are said to feel like a completely different game altogether.

=Development= Leon Hallas started the development of Cavedesign soon before Trollquest's public release. At first, it was supposed to be a proof of concept for minigames to be integrated in the game. The prototype was shared among the developers of SNE, and eventually it was implemented in Trollquest as an easter egg. However, it attracted much more attention than anticipated, and SNE decided to push its development forward.

At the time, it was advertised as an Alpha test phase. It entered the beta test phase on June 12th, 2015. The final public release was on August 16th, and has been updated regularily with bugfixes and new features ever since.

=User-generated and downloadable content= One part that made Cavedesign as famous as it is now is arguably thanks to how customizable it is. Players can very easily create and share content for the game. Skin edits, maps, structures, or even game modifications, are the core of Cavedesign's popularity.

=Reception= On late July 2015, Cavedesign passed 2 million copies sold, barely one month after the beta release. This number continued to grow steadily before exploding after the public release, going from 7 million copies sold to 15 million in less than 2 weeks.

=Merchandise= Soon after the public launch, SNE started working with Item Shop, an online game merchandise store, to sell Cavedesign merchandise. Small replicas of popular ingame items such as weapons and consumeables were available at launch, quickly followed by shirts and other standard merch.