Dodge Roll cancels paid Enter the Gungeon expansion in favor of a smaller, free update

We have at several points in the past spoken about doing a paid expansion for Gungeon following AG&D, though more recently we have tried to temper those expectations in some of our exchanges. There are a few reasons for this. Working on Gungeon, in particular the last year of development, has become very taxing. Frankly, we are far better at making video games today than we were four and a half years ago; this is good, of course, but it shows just how shaky our foundations for Gungeon truly are. This is compounded by the nature of the game that Gungeon is: every new item, gun, or enemy has to interact with (or at the very least, not break) every other gun, item, or enemy. Putting any new piece of content in the game has become a chore of navigating years-old code and ensuring that no combination of items (etc) breaks it. The complexity of this work for our small team resulted in an unfortunately buggy initial release of AG&D, and has given us the sense that this complexity will only grow. The wear on our team was so strong that we discussed cancelling AG&D multiple times during its development, or taking a year off after its release. This is partly why AG&D took as long as it did.

The short version is: we have been working on Gungeon for nearly five years now, and from both a technical and a creativity standpoint, we need to move on. We have learned so many things about making games that are just impossible to put into practice in Gungeon (without rebuilding the entire game), and honestly, we're just more excited about putting these ideas into practice in a new game.

For the reasons outlined above we have chosen to cease development of the planned paid expansion, and instead deliver a smaller, free and final update. Without this decision, we would be unable to do our best work, and the game and the players deserve better. We hope that you will understand, and we are deeply sorry for readying you for a larger expansion. We committed too early… this is one of the many lessons we’ve had to learn the hard way during Gungeon’s development. On the other hand, something else we’ve learned from Gungeon is that our community deeply values transparency, hence this lengthy post.

We are currently working on Enter the Gungeon’s final update, the name of which we will reveal soon. It will address some lingering and annoying bugs (and console crashes), and add one long requested feature: a new character that starts with random equipment, as well as a number of new guns (~20), items (~10), and synergies (~?). It will also add a handful of other small features. As mentioned, this (smaller) update, in Gungeon tradition, will be free for all players. The randomized “Paradox” character will not have their own past, but instead play a random one should you choose to kill your past, rather than ending your run somewhere… hotter. We will be including some console (notably Switch) performance improvements in this as well. We are looking to have this update into console certification before the end of the year. There is also the physical release of Gungeon, and the physical ammonomicon, which just recently went on sale at Special Reserve Games.

Further down the line, there will also likely be some other Gungeon news, but we can’t go into detail yet. We are doing some experiments that hopefully you will enjoy.

So, after the patch, what is next with Dodge Roll? After much debate and many ideas thrown around, we believe we have finally decided on a new game to spend the next few years of our lives on. It is at an incredibly, incredibly early stage, so we can’t say much but the designs are coming together. In many ways, it is a more ambitious idea than Gungeon. As mentioned above, we have learned so many lessons from Gungeon, and we are doing our best to put them to work, and hope to avoid the problems detailed above with our next game. 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. That’s about all I can say for now, but please know that we are excited, and we hope you will be too.

Thank you again for helping to foster such a wonderful community. We have discussed on a number of occasions just how uniquely kind and excited our community is, and it is always a pillar of encouragement. The kind words, the fanart, the feedback and gun ideas, have all been a surreal and real pleasure to hear and see. We can’t thank you enough. Enter the Gungeon, and you, have changed our lives and we hope that you will be with us again when the time comes.