there is a reason why FPS games cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop.
That's nonsense. The only reason there are so many absurdly overbudgeted FPS games out there is because it's a super popular genre that can count on selling enough copies to make the money back. Any genre could end up spending as much money if they thought they'd make that money back, and
plenty several do. (The "AAA" industry really does restrict itself to only a small number of genres, because that's the only way they can justify the budgets people expect of them.) But there are a lot of first-person dungeon-crawling turn-based RPGs out there with a similar appearance. They're sometimes known as "DRPGs" (the D is for dungeon, which is a bit misleading because most RPGs have dungeons even if they're not DRPGs), and the dev is probably using a plug-in designed specifically to make those kinds of games.
Of course there are plenty of design issues with it, and games that are designed entirely to be played as "DRPGs" tend to do some important things differently (like
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- although the popular Etrian Odyssey series was known for having you fill out the minimap by hand, as a callback to some of the oldest games in the genre that people played while having a pencil and paper on the desk next to them), but the point is that there are plenty of indie games that use a similar style and do it just fine without an absurd budget.
