Dear Reader:

You are viewing a story from GN Version 5.0. Time may not have been kind to formatting, integrity of links, images, information, etc.

Dodge Roll discusses why they're wrapping up Enter the Gungeon, teases a future project set in the Gungeon universe

Enter a different Gungeon
by rawmeatcowboy
19 April 2019
GN Version 5.0

With the Farewell to Arms update, Dodge Roll is officially done creating new content for Enter the Gungeon. They'll release patches and tweaks, but the game is now considered content complete. After such a huge success, many are wondering why Dodge Roll has decided to move on. Dev Dave Crooks was asked that very question by PCGamesInsider, and you can check out his answer below.

Creative and technical fatigue. After five years of developing Enter the Gungeon, with many interesting and potentially creatively fulfilling ideas and opportunities passed on, combined with increasingly annoying technical slogs to get new features working without generating new bugs, we just needed to move on to stay happy, to stay productive, and to stay sane. Gungeon is a game where, by design, everything interacts with everything else, and everything is decided at runtime.

All new content had to play well and not break countless other decisions that had been architected in different development “eras.” We couldn’t just add Orbit Bullets for example; they had to interact nicely with 8 fundamentally different weapon categories, companions that shoot fundamentally different kinds of bullets, and other complicated bullet movement modifiers like Helix Bullets. New content had to be interesting, had to be different and worthwhile; with hundreds of guns, items, enemies, and bosses, the options within the framework of the game become slimmer.

The more interesting stuff we added in, the more difficult it became to add anything else without things breaking. After years of this steady climb in implementation complexity, adding new interesting guns and items slowed to a crawl, and became less fun to work on as it became more fragile.

While there might not be any new content for Enter the Gungeon in the works, that doesn't mean Dodge Roll is done with the series. When asked about future projects, Crooks had to say.

We are currently working on a handful of projects, none of which I can speak about in detail. All I can say is that at least one of them is likely going to be set within the Gungeon universe.

[Link]