None of the bullets have what Crooks calls singular velocity - they’re all on different arcs and moving at different speeds - and he says that the game also has to wipe some of them off the screen in certain cases to prevent the player getting stuck in a sea of bullets they can’t avoid. It couldn’t encompass the growing range of enemies and items Dodge Roll was coming up with and simply wasn’t designed for the fundamental difference between the open scrolling field of a standard shmup and the freely explorable 2D space of a dungeon crawler.įor example, they’d designed a boss called the Kill Pillars, which rises and then slams down, creating spokes of bullets that spin around the centre of its impact and rings of bullets that radiate out from it, causing you to have to dodge roll through them. He’d made an open source bullet scripting system called BulletML, which gave control over the spawning of bullets.Ĭrooks and his team began to incorporate BulletML into their game, but soon found even that wasn’t enough. “People have pioneered this stuff so we should follow in their footsteps.” Turns out there was a system, and people had indeed pioneered it: namely, Kenta Cho, legendary doujin shmup maker behind Noiz2sa, Gunroar and Tumiki Fighters. “I was playing all these bullet hell games and watching videos and I was thinking there had to be a system in there,” Crooks tells me. But while it might sound like all you need to create bullet hell, it didn’t nearly provide the variety and interest of patterns Crooks and his team at Dodge Roll wanted. The game then had control over the number of bullets, their angle and frequency, and random delays between the patterns. The first prototype took a straightforward and perhaps obvious approach, with enemies constantly pointing a gun at the player, and its muzzle was the spawn point of its bullets. Incorporating bullet hell patterns in a 2D action dungeon-crawler wasn’t simple. So Gungeon became a game in which you dance through dense patterns of bullets. It seemed to chime with his other love for Dark Souls, particularly its dodge roll and the frames of invincibility it grants (a love so deep he named his studio after it). Ikaruga isn’t a purebred bullet hell game, but lead developer Dave Crooks loved its core mechanic of switching colours, which gives your ship immunity to bullets of the same colour. The inspiration came from a source the many shmup fans will bristle at: Ikaruga. Not that traditional shmup-style bullet hell is necessarily a logical fit for a dungeon-crawler. Because if you’re going to make a game about guns, it kind of makes sense that it would feature: Bullets which radiate and fan out like flowers across the screen. You’re entering the Gungeon to find a gun so powerful it can kill the past. It’s a dungeon-crawler in which you shoot guns.Ģ. Įnter the Gungeon’s conception was an idle conversation about what shape a game called Enter the Gungeon would take. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games.
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