While the core staff at The Behemoth are working on their latest game, Pit People, staff from Newgrounds have been working on a promising game separately – albeit with only a few core team members.

Their new game is titled Nightmare Cops, and it literally has players.. you guessed it – hunting down the monsters in people’s nightmares.

The game is being developed by Tom Fulp as the programmer, with Jeff Bandelin (JohnnyUtah) and Cory Beck (spazkid) on art, and Chris O’Neill (oneyng) handling music.

Players will explore a “fully realized world” that has tons of different characters, all of which have their own perceptions of each other. Your main focus is beating the crap out of “lots of bad guys,” while also driving all around town smashing things. The team noted “pretty much everything” in the overworld is breakable, for no reason other than knowing people want to break stuff.

The game includes lots of dialog and even has quite a few guest voices from members of the Newgrounds community – it’s worth mentioning the game will be an official Newgrounds release, not one by The Behemoth.

Lots of attention to animation and dialog was made, there’s even a lip-syncing app Talk Head, which the team developed years prior just for this purpose.

Here are the first screenshots:

Nightmare Cops has been in development for a few years now mostly as a labor of love from the involved staff, as it has “a ridiculous amount of blood, sweat and love put into it.” Fulp described the game as “by far the biggest project any of us have ever undertaken,” but notes the game “will be worth it.”

The game will be publicly playable for the first time at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, at booth #229 with The Behemoth and friends (other indie devs). A release date wasn’t mentioned, however a console and Steam release is planned. The first trailer for the game is supposed to follow its public debut at SDCC – so we’ll keep you guys posted.