Diablo creator David Brevik is releasing a 2D sandbox RPG called It Lurks Below later this year

Diablo creator David Brevik has announced his own indie game: a 2D sandbox RPG called It Lurks Below. Players will explore randomly generated levels, delving into dungeons and fighting baddies while collecting as much loot as they can get their pixely hands on. 

It'll have free-form building, too, in the same vein as Minecraft and Terraria. Brevik told Polygon that he's a big fan of those games but 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, who more recently worked on Path of Exile, plans to launch the game on Steam later this year with three game modes: a "creative" mode, a normal mode, and a permadeath mode. Players will go into battle armed with melee weapons and wands that have their own elemental stats, and each monster will have "its own trick"—something Brevik carried over from the Diablo series. 

He's been working on the game fully for the past year or so, he said. He initially envisaged a much larger game but ending up scaling it down to save time (the original idea would've taken 10 years to make). 

Brevik, whose development company is called Graybeard Games, will launch a closed beta this weekend. There are only 200 spots available, so you're more likely to catch a glimpse of it on his Twitch channel. He'll be playing the game there on Friday (February 2) at 2pm PT / 7pm EST / 12am GMT.

Here's a couple more screenshots from the game: