Minecraft Dungeons started life as a Nintendo 3DS game
Before Mojang Switched focus.
According to a new video on the Minecraft YouTube channel, the concept for Minecraft Dungeons originally came about when the team were trying to design a game for the Nintendo 3DS.
This comes from a video titled 'Minecraft Dungeons Diaries: Origins', which is seemingly the first in a series providing some background and insight into Mojang's new action-adventure game (thanks VG247).
"It all started when we were trying to figure out a cool, Minecraft-style game for the 3DS," says chief creative officer, Jens Bergensten. "We toyed with a bunch of different ideas but finally making a dungeon crawler was something that really struck a chord with us."
The Minecraft Dungeons team is also working closely with the vanilla Minecraft team to make sure everything in Dungeons could fit into the vanilla game. The video goes on to explain how Dungeons is sticking to one of the vanilla game's core principles of being easily accessible to anyone, regardless of age or skill, and goes into a bit of detail on how it'll be different to other dungeon exploring games.
"Characters in Minecraft do not have any inherent abilities. They don't have skills, you don't have abilities, nothing like that that you find over time," says game director, Måns Olson. "Instead, in Dungeons we focused very much on 'you are what you wear'. You find weapons, you find armour and you enchant those, and that becomes your character."
According to executive producer David Nisshagen, Dungeons is "taking Minecraft from one game into multiple games that feel unique, but still fit together". Perhaps we'll see Mojang branch out into even more genres in the future, but for now it seems the developer has more than enough to be getting on with.
Minecraft Dungeons is slated for release in 2020, and will be available for PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch (not 3DS, though you can get vanilla Minecraft on that if you really want to).