How Enter The Gungeon Was Made by Waiting in a Parking Lot For 6 Hours

Enter The Gungeon was developed by Dodge Roll, a studio formed by ex-employees of game company Mythic Entertainment. In 2006, Electronic Arts purchased Mythic Entertainment. By early 2013, three employees from Mythic joined forces to work on their own projects. Brent Sodman and David Rubel, both programmers, and Dave Crooks, a designer, would often meet up to brainstorm game ideas. Close friend and artist Joe Harty, along with sound designer and Dave’s partner Erica Hampson, would join in as well. One of those game concepts was Spin Cycle, a game they had made for an IndieSpeedRun game jam.

David, Brent and Dave had started saving their money in the hopes of creating their own indie development studio someday. In January 2014, they even announced to their bosses at Mythic they would be leaving by the end of the summer. But a few months later, after a disastrous launch of the game Dungeon Keeper, the friends sensed their careers at Mythic might be ending sooner than planned. In May 2014, their suspicions were confirmed. “EA did what it does and closed Mythic down. We had the chance to go to another EA studio, but instead we decided to take our savings and go and do our own thing. Since we were ready to go and start our own thing mentally, when the call came in that Mythic was shutting down, we just looked at each other and said, ‘Ok. Let’s take like four days off, and then start working immediately.’”

The day after Mythic shut down, Dave, Brent and Erica, who shared an apartment, turned their living room into an office space, where David and Joe would be working from as well. The team had been playing around with ideas for Enter the Gungeon for a while, and opted to follow their gut feeling instead of continuing work on Spin Cycle. Dave had been listening to the soundtrack of the game ‘Gun Godz’ and the word ‘gungeon’, as a combination of ‘gun’ and ‘dungeon’, came to him the next day. He then sat down with Brent over lunch as they wondered ‘what would a game called Enter the Gungeon look like?’. When Brent asked him why anyone would want to enter this Gungeon, Dave on a whim responded with ‘to get the gun that can kill the past’. Enter the Gungeon’s basic premise was born. They worked out the basic lore of the game that same lunch break.

After replaying some of their favorite dungeon crawler rogue-likes like Shiren the Wanderer, Chocobo’s Dungeon and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, the team had a clear idea of the key elements for Enter the Gungeon: dungeon crawler meets guns, intricate bullet hell patterns, and an invincible dodge roll, all set in a dungeon bathing in a ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ feel. It’s a good thing the concept came together so quickly, because Dodge Roll had to move faster than expected. With Mythic’s closure announced on May 29th, the developers wanted to have something to show at E3, which kicked off only eleven days later. Dave flew to E3 in Los Angeles with nothing but a backpack and an early prototype of the game on his laptop. He didn’t even have an entrance badge for the event, or an appointment with Devolver, the publisher Dave and the rest of the team wanted to work with.

However, Devolver had set up its booth just outside of the L.A. Convention Center, as part of Devolver’s marketing strategy to host an anti-convention event, parodying big events such as E3. Luckily for Dave, that meant he didn’t need a badge to be able to gain access to the Devolver kiosk and sell his idea. Devolver was mostly at E3 to promote their own games to press and partners though, not to talk to developers and hear their pitches. Nigel Lowrie, Chief Marketing Officer for Devolver Digital, had meeting after meeting scheduled with journalists to show off their demos. So, Dave sat down in the parking lot and waited. After six hours, Dave was finally able to pull Nigel aside, open his laptop and pitch Enter the Gungeon.

Nigel asked how much time Dodge Roll would need for development and on which platforms they wanted to release the game, not revealing whether or not he liked what Dave was pitching. After the meeting, Dave called his team, and admitted he didn’t have a clue whether he’d been successful. Other people had expressed liking Enter the Gungeon, and Dave thought they might have back-up options if Devolver would turn them down, especially since Sony and Microsoft were on the hunt for games for the newly launched Xbox One and Playstation 4. Dave was already preparing to book meetings with other publishers, until Devolver made them an offer, only a week after E3.

Despite Nigel’s unreadable expression, it turned out he had instantly loved the Enter the Gungeon demo, saying it felt so polished and playable already, in contrast to the more vague game concepts he usually got pitched. Nigel also admitted it helped that the Dodge Roll crew came from an established video game studio, knowing the ins and outs of development already, and that they didn’t ask for money. The team had invested all of their savings into this endeavor, not wanting to rely on external funding from the very beginning. A partner like Devolver would mostly help them to handle marketing, PR, legal deals and so on. They also decided against using a kickstarter campaign to further fund Enter the Gungeon, since connections in the industry had told them running a Kickstarter campaign was basically a fulltime job, so the team focused on development instead.

Dodge Roll continued working from their living room, expanding the Enter the Gungeon demo, adding new levels, enemies and guns. Throughout development, Dodge Roll was inspired by many games: Spelunky, Nuclear Throne, Dark Souls, Super Meat Boy, Metal Gear Solid and many more. But Binding of Isaac was probably the biggest source of inspiration, the developers being big fans of the game. When it specifically came to dungeon design, the aim was to make dungeons as good as the ones in The Legend of Zelda, which is why Gungeon’s structural lay-outs feel so similar.

Interestingly, Dodge Roll never really set out to make a roguelike, it was more their response to what the devs were seeing on the market at the time. Realizing they were taking a chance with Gungeon, they wanted to find the sweet spot between playing it safe, while still implementing many of the mechanics they liked. Similarly to Binding of Isaac, the more you play and the more you progress, the more items, guns and enemies you might encounter on a run. The team also quickly realized the game would be more fun and fair if the levels would be hand designed. Though the individual rooms were handcrafted, the levels in the game were procedurally generated, connecting rooms randomly into a dungeon. A great deal of trial and error went into designing the level generator. The developers created a room, and played it multiple times, before making a set of rules of what they considered to be good dungeon designs. Then they structured floor layouts based on those rules, so the generator could easily ‘learn’ what made a good level.

Two essential components in Enter The Gungeon are the dodge roll and the bullet hell gameplay. Dave loved the bullet hell mechanic in Ikaruga, specifically when the bullets changed colors and gave your ship immunity to bullets of the same color. But with that many bullets on screen, the players would have a hard time actually avoiding them. That’s where the dodge roll mechanic came into play. Just like in Dark Souls for example, the dodge rolls have invincibility frames, meaning the player can dodge roll through bullets. Dave and the team even love dodge rolls so much, they named their studio after it.

As the player progresses deeper into the dungeon, the developers wanted the game to feel like a combination of a D&D adventure and a Shoot ‘em up. To survive the constant rain of bullets, the player has to master the timing of the roll. It allows for situations that would be impossible to beat in other games, and gives fights a unique rhythm. “The dodge roll is the first mechanic other than shooting that went into the game. When we discussed merging a bullet hell game with a dungeon crawler, we immediately started talking about how to “pull an Ikaruga” – or otherwise give the player a way to deal with the massive amount of bullets, that wasn’t just weaving through them.”

The developers tested out many different bullet mechanics. In early prototypes, enemies would continually point a gun at the player, and its muzzle would be the spawn point for bullets. At first, it seemed logical that the game controlled the number of bullets, angle, frequency at which they were fired and random delays in between. But Dodge Roll found this wasn’t interesting enough, and wanted to add even more variety. In later stages of development, the game also featured a quick-time reload, similar to Gears of War. The damage done by reloaded bullets would increase if you’d press the right button at the right time. But the team found players were already distracted enough by everything else going on in the game. Instead they limited this feature to a power-up.

It was crucial that the bullets were smart and knew exactly where not only the player, but also the other bullets were situated in the room. The bullet’s movement couldn’t just be based on speed and acceleration, but also had to adhere to more advanced game rules. While the devs were extensively studying other bullet hell games, they realized they wouldn’t be able to make the perfect bullet hell gameplay themselves. Instead, they started looking for already existing technology. Eventually, the team stumbled on BulletML, an open source bullet scripting system which gives extensive control over the spawning of bullets. It was pioneered by Kenta Cho, who worked on games like Gunroar and Tumiki Fighters. However, even after incorporating BulletML into Gungeon, the team still found the outcome lacking. The open scrolling field and explorable 2D space of the levels required a more specific approach.

Therefore, programmer David Rubel created his own version of BulletML called RubelML, to perfectly fit Gungeon’s requirements and needs. Each boss or enemy requires specific bullet patterns and different types of bullets that would need to appear. Take for example the Mine Flayer, a boss referencing the Mind Flayer from Dungeons & Dragons. This boss has several ‘regular’ attacks, but its most intricate one is the bell attack: the Mine Flayer will disappear, leaving behind sentient bells, and will only reappear if the player kills the correct bell. Kill an incorrect one, and the bell will explode into a ring of bullets. Thanks to RubelML, incorporating bosses like the Mine Flayer wasn’t as much of a daunting coding task as before.

Every single pixel art design was entirely Joe Harty’s achievement. He even learned pixel art specifically for Enter the Gungeon. While designing the bullets, Joe went through many prototypes, essentially steering the art direction of the entire game. He tried out different sizes of bullets, eventually settling for a much larger size and very stark, bright color scheme of white and red, so the player could spot them instantly on screen, as they contrasted against the very dark dungeon floors. The team even scrapped a level that was set in heaven, since the bullets were hardly visible against light backgrounds.

Joe also designed most of the weapons. As a player, you can loot and equip more than 200 guns, each unique and fun, and they keep the game interesting for many, many runs, ranging from a gun that fires bees, to the Unicorn Horn that shoots rainbows while cheerful music plays. Several of them are clever nods to other games and video game systems, including the NES Zapper, The Megahand inspired by Mega Man and The Bounty Hunter Arm from Metroid to name a few. It took Joe the full two years of development to design all the weapons from scratch, though naturally not all guns made it into the game. There were reportedly about 50 half-built guns in various stages of development. The famous Portal gun was considered, but the team couldn’t get it to work with the top-down perspective, losing its usefulness according to Dave.

The team’s favorite games all had one thing in common: big, memorable bosses. The boss fights in Gungeon had to stand apart from other encounters in the game, and had to be challenging enough that the players had to be on their A-game. For the actual design of the boss characters, the entire team cooperated. Dave or Joe would pitch ideas, finding inspiration in Dungeons & Dragons, mythology, and more of their favorite games, then giving these bosses all sorts of guns that referenced their inspiration or made for a good gun pun. One example is the Beholster: a monster styled after D&D’s Beholder, but instead of a bunch of eyes, he holds a gun in the end of each tentacle. Then it was up to programmer David to create fitting bullet hell patterns for each unique boss fight.

Even though the team was making headway, it wasn’t just smooth sailing from there. Dodge Roll had set out to release the game in April 2015. However, in January that year it became clear that there was too much work left to meet the deadline. The game simply had grown larger than expected. The amount of levels and monsters that still had to be designed, and the amount of polishing that was still needed, made for an impossible workload and consequently many long work nights followed. Development took almost a year longer than expected, because of time management and planning issues: the team wanted to put a lot of time and effort into the small details, prepped different demos for game shows and conventions and as a new studio, were constantly moving from one crisis to another. They admitted this also caused them to implement features as fast as possible, instead of in the best way possible.

Delaying the development timeline also had consequences for Gungeon’s market position. In 2015, the market for indie games on Steam was changing: many more pixel-art roguelikes were being released, and the competition for Enter the Gungeon grew more fierce by the day. With their savings invested into the game and work weeks of 7 days a week, for months on end, the team grew worried. The developers knew making a good game would be just the start: in order for it to be a success they would have to market it properly as well. “It was more that we were very afraid of the marketing, of trying to get noticed and find our audience. Because I play absolutely everything I can, and there are a bunch of games I play on Steam that are totally excellent, but unfortunately have not been nearly as successful as Gungeon has. And that instilled a great deal of fear in us. We always knew having Devolver would help us some amount, but it’s so hard to quantify… When we were coming out, the amount of copies we had to sell to break even would be considered a success for many indie games. And that was really scary.”

By the summer of 2015, Dodge Roll had run out of money. Luckily Devolver stepped up and helped the developers finish the game, while also helping them to get more exposure. Now, nearing the final stages of the development process, the team realized the importance of creating a ‘streamable’ game, both because it was more fun for players, and to better reach their target audience. The team requested feedback from streamers, specifically why it might work or wouldn’t work for their audiences. That feedback formed the basis for many alterations during development.

Many streamers told them to combine the use of guns and items, making for thousands of possibilities to fight your way through the dungeon and so the team did exactly that. Then it was time to tackle the details: fine-tune encounters with enemies, the weapons, and make sure the game felt fair for players. “Lots of thought went into making everything readable and feel fair and if you do get hit, it looks like it and you understand why. I feel we’ve done a good job of that, maybe even a very good job. Obviously, there are fans who will say that there are definitely still some bits of bs left in the game, but we tried our best to minimize that stuff. We really really care about it.”

While the pixel art looks great, it did come with its own set of challenges when the team was building the game in Unity. Scaling the pixel art to work on any screen took a lot of time and effort. With that many bullets flying everywhere all the time, the developers also had to test how far they could push the visual experience. When would there be too much going on for the player to cope with? It’s a very visually intensive game, and the developers expressed that. Though they didn’t have a ‘visually too stimulating quota’ in terms of number of things on the screen, they did try to develop a visual language, so the player would know what to focus on.

Adam Drucker, or Doseone, is a rapper, producer and poet who created the soundtrack for Enter the Gungeon. Gungeon’s difficult and intense gameplay required a fitting soundtrack to accompany it. Doseone’s background as an indie rapper weaved its way into the Gungeon soundtrack, although it didn’t start out that way. The initial idea for the soundtrack was quite different from the actual end result. At first, Doseone had created a track more fitting for a Zelda game, until Dave said that the songs were “almost too mellow” and that “they had to go harder”. Even though the art design of the game was pixel art, the music had to be intense. “Catchy, but not lyrical” as Doseone described it. The end result is a soundtrack that spurs players on, fueling them as they make their way through the levels. Erica Hampson was responsible for the sound design and creating all the sound effects.

After two uncertain years of constantly moving from one crisis to the next, showing different demos of the game at events, and 7-day work weeks, Enter the Gungeon released on April 5th 2016. It received very positive reviews from critics and gamers who praised the intense action gameplay, the game’s humor and the beautiful pixel art style. Some reviewers criticized the level of difficulty, though many critics also named that as one of the main reasons they loved the game. Just eight hours after release, Enter the Gungeon turned a profit. Within the first week it had sold more than 200,000 copies for PC and Playstation 4, over 1 million after 15 months, exceeding 3 million sold copies after almost 4 years, by January 2020.

Dodge Roll wasn’t set on resting on its laurels, as it started working on free post-release content. More weapons, enemies, and levels were released in the Supply Drop update in January 2017. A year after Gungeon’s release, a port to the Xbox one was also made available, and a version for the Nintendo Switch followed by December 2017. In July 2018, Dodge Roll released a second major update titled ‘Advanced Gungeons & Draguns’, providing players with even more weapons and enemies.

‘Advanced Gungeons & Draguns’ took 18 difficult months of development and the team even considered canceling it multiple times. The huge support of the Gungeon community motivated them to start developing a third major update, but despite their best efforts, Dodge Roll ended up canceling it in November 2018. By then, the team had been working on Enter the Gungeon for almost five years, and focusing so hard and for so long on one project. The developers explained that Gungeon’s foundations were shaky, since the game was developed when Dodge Roll wasn’t as experienced yet. That meant that making new content for it was very frustrating: every time a new gun would be added to the game, the team had to go back in and test it against every other effect that was already in the game, without generating new bugs. The studio also passed on many interesting opportunities and creative ideas while focusing on Enter the Gungeon. This was beginning to take its toll on the team’s motivation, and technical and creative fatigue was starting to set in.

Dodge Roll did release a final smaller free update: ‘A Farewell to Arms’, in April 2019. This would fix last bugs and would continue to support the game. It eventually snowballed into an update as big as the first update, making it a proper final ‘thank you’ to the fans. In March 2020, the studio also announced Enter the Gungeon: House of the Gundead: an arcade machine version of their game that they created in cooperation with Griffin Aerotech.

Looking back on their entire development journey, the developers learned many lessons that will undoubtedly help them in their next project. Picking team members with care and keeping the team small was key to their success: the bigger the team, the more pressure to make an absolute smash hit of a game to keep a studio afloat. Dave encourages applying for grants, as some countries outside of the US do financially support indie game development projects. Having some international friends on the team might be useful: if the majority of your team is from a country that provides grants, you might already be eligible to receive funding. It would have made things a lot easier for Dodge Roll, as they wouldn’t have had to invest all their savings into this endeavor. Dave admitted that in the future he would also be more cautious about announcing release dates, unless he was certain he would actually be able to meet the deadline, or about underestimating the process of bringing a PC game to a console. His biggest takeaway from Enter the Gungeon however, was the need for a solid plan before starting development and to be smarter about spending his time. For example: he wouldn’t waste too much development time on creating different versions of the game just to show at events.

“We definitely didn’t plan our game as well as I think we will every time in the future. And it cost us a lot of mental health and having to make up for it in crunch. There’s this rule around doing pretty much anything in games–and other disciplines as well–that says, ‘Take whatever amount of time you think it’s going to take and then times it by three.’ I’ve heard that a million times, and when I heard it on our game, I was like, ‘Yeah, but we’re going to be faster.’ If I’ve learned anything, it’s more like five times as much. Just try to be as shrewd and pessimistic as possible on all things related to time and money, because it’s definitely pretty rough out there.”

But what’s in the cards for Dodge Roll after Enter the Gungeon? In April 2019, the team said to be working on multiple projects, with one of them likely to be set in the Gungeon universe. “In many ways, it is a more ambitious idea than Gungeon. In short, we are making the foundations more robust. This will make certain things that were impossible on Gungeon, possible, and take ideas scratched at with Gungeon to the next level. We will do our very best to bring the humor, challenge, reactive combat, detail, and quality you have hopefully come to expect from Dodge Roll.” The developers had never expected Enter the Gungeon to take such a prominent place in the indie game landscape. Whether their next game will be such a big hit, and what that game will look like, is still a mystery. Will we get an Enter the Gungeon 2? Or a brand new game? Whatever game they end up developing, we can only presume Dodge Roll has a bright future.