 "Anvil of Dawn" was developed by DreamForge Intertainment.In the concept stage, the team chose to focus the game on atmosphere and player immersion, which led to the decision to pre-render the game's environments via three-dimensional (3D) graphical models.While real-time 3D graphics were used by certain other dungeon crawl games at the time, DreamForge believed that their environments looked "flat and pixellated", and sought greater realism through pre-rendering.