SF – How do the playable characters work? Do they each have a special ability or starting weapons, like the characters in Isaac?

BS – Pretty much. There are four characters so far in development. We’ve got the Convict, the Soldier, the Pilot and the Guide who all have these little stories which I won’t go into now but they are all there to discover. They all have a unique starting gun which is pretty weak but if you finish their personal story… we’re still talking about this but what I want to do, but we’ll have some kind of variant of this, where if you finish their personal story, they’ll permanently start with a powered up version of that gun.

SF – A bit similar to the Golden weapons in Nuclear Throne then?

BS – Is that how they work? I haven’t played Nuclear Throne in months.

SF – I think I’m right in saying that. When you find a Golden weapon in Nuclear Throne, it then becomes your character’s starting weapon, with some improvements over the original.

BS – Well, it’s a bit like that then. I need to get back into that game. I love it but it’s so hard. I thought I was good at roguelikes but I can’t even finish it.

SF- Same. I can just about do an Isaac run but Nuclear Throne wrecks me.

BS – Those guys are so cool. Anyway, I could gush about Vlambeer for ages. So, back to the game, it will work something like that but we are still discussing it. They will all have a unique starting gun as well as a unique passive ability. They probably won’t have unique active abilities as we have pretty much used up all buttons for items, shooting and so on but the passives we are playing around with could have some interesting effects. The one for the Convict is called Death Sentence, which has a % chance to instantly kill an enemy with a single shot, if I remember correctly.

SF – Right, let’s talk about the Gungeon more specifically. We know it’s procedurally generated but are there specific rest floors or areas for shopkeepers/friendly NPCs or are they hidden throughout Gungeon floors to find?

BS – For the demo, we locked the dungeon generation to one of about 30 preset seed values so we could make sure it was all good and that I could help people out on the show floor if they were struggling but it’s still totally procedural generated. I’m saying that mainly in case someone went ‘Hey, there’s only 30 dungeons’ because we locked it to 30.

But yeah, it’s all procedural which has a lot of benefits to it. The shop, for instance, will always appear on every floor as of now and always out in the open to encounter, there’s no secret to finding it. It won’t have any enemies in it either so it’s a safe zone for players. I believe it is coded on the 1st floor to always link two regions of the dungeon so you’ll clear a hub with some loops coming off it and you’ll reach the shop which is this kind of link between the previous area and the second half of the floor.

The floors sort of have this layout that they prefer, but will generate around it. It’s not a map per say but like a flowchart almost. We also have these little teleport pads that are in important rooms like the room outside the boss or the shop that you can go warp back to at any point you want.

SF – That seems a really helpful feature.

BS – It mainly came from when I was playing Isaac and I’d beat the boss, walk back to the shop, buy something and then walk back again. We’d just thought we’d removing the walking in between.

SF – So, similar to the mid-dungeon and boss warps in certain Zelda games. Just saves a lot of otherwise wasted time.

BS – Yeah, I agree. You just hold L2 down, or Tab on PC and you pull up your map and simply warp to the room you want. Anyway, I was talking about the rooms which aren’t just combat. In the demo, we have the Truthknower, who is this monk that supposedly knows all and asks you questions. He is hidden in a secret room which can be accessed one of two ways. If you are really eagle eyed, you can press a switch hidden on the wall, which will make the secret door slide open or you can hit the wall with an explosive and it will blow open, just like in the Binding of Isaac.

In the demo currently, all the secret rooms have explosive barrels near their entrance to increase the chances of you finding them because it’s really kind of the things you will learn the placement of after many playthroughs. People were only getting one play at PSX so we were just making it a bit easier to spot so they could actually find the secret rooms.

SF – So, like you can usually guess in Isaac that if there are four rooms surrounding a blank space, there is probably a secret there.

BS – Right and you can see the little switch on the wall too. I thought it would be easy to see as I’ve played Isaac so much, that I thought if we put anything visual there, people would spot it instantly. However, the switch is really hard to see as our walls are a little more ‘pixel-dense’ than Isaac’s, in terms of the pixels having more design on them so it blends in more easily. It worked out pretty decently in the end actually.

SF – The weapons look absolutely crazy. I’ve seen a mailbox gun, a rainbow beam rifle and a bee launcher so far. What is your favourite weapon that has been designed so far and can you possibly combine weapons together? Maybe a rocket launcher that shoots homing rainbow bees?

BS – I’ll have to answer the second question first as I think what my favourite gun is. So, there won’t be a way to combine two guns per say, but there are certain pickups which add the effects of certain guns to anyone you are using. There’s a passive right now that’ll give any gun a triple shot which is pretty crazy when you use it on some of the beams and are spewing lasers everywhere.

Actually, thinking the way it is coded, it wouldn’t be impossible to combine some of the simple guns… I’ll have a play around with it but there are definitely items which will play around with how you shoot and they modify guns.

SF – So, stackable passives basically?

BS – Yeah. In the design of this game, one of the changes we wanted to make from other roguelikes is, let’s take how Isaac does these stacking items and instead of just stacking these items onto you, let’s stack them onto your weapon, right? So, this is to make you ask interesting questions like ‘I’ve got this really powerful gun but it is low on ammo so should I use it?’ We wanted to add this secondary layer to combat and upgrade decisions.

Anyway, my favourite gun? That’s a really tough question actually. I think there is like 100 guns in the game right now and we’re always adding more so…

SF – Do top 5 if that is any easier.

BS – Okay, top 5. Well, I think the funniest one is the barrel which shoots fish. I mean, that joke just writes itself. The fish shooting barrel is definitely a top one for me. We’ve got this yellow blaster than we just put in. It’s a normal laser looking gun… I think it is on the website but it shoots these big, long, yellow bursts of energy which bounce off walls. We have a couple guns in the game which bounce off walls but this one seems to work really well in clearing out a room. So, in terms of just a solid weapon, that’s one of my favourites.

In terms of something that is super overpowered, the Yari rocket launcher which is in our trailer, is like a machine gun rocket launcher. It is just an absurd gun. It is really silly and will just totally clear a room in seconds. It’s certainly one of the apex guns which if you find in a red chest, which is one of our best chests, you’ll think this is the run now.

SF – That leads me to ask, is it a tiered system with chests with like white chests being standard guns and so on?

BS – Basically. Right now, there are 5 types of chests which you can find in game, with a few secret ones. The basic chest is just a brown wooden one, which isn’t locked or anything. It usually just has a boring gun in it, or a heart, or a key or something. From there, there are sort of two paths that the chests go up with the green and black chest, followed by the silver and the red chest. The difference between the two paths is that one is more likely to contain items and passives while the other to contain guns so you sort of know what you’re getting before you open up the chest.

The black and the red chests are bigger and more obvious, so you always know that you’re getting something good, which is a great feeling.

SF – Gets rid of that fear in Isaac when you reach a gold chest and you never know what is going to be inside it. Could be great or could be awful.

BS – Exactly! Or it could be like when you go up to a cursed chest and you are constantly asking yourself, is this going to be spiders again?

SF – More often than not it is spiders from my experience.

BS – So true. But in Isaac, it adds to the humour that everything is trying to kill you.  Anyway, I think I have two more guns to list? There’s the Unicorn Horn, which is a gun that shoots out a massive rainbow that is really cool, but a lot of people don’t get the full effect of the weapon when they see it on the site. It actually has a sort of wobbly beam that bends if you move while shooting it. It’s like a stream of water almost.

It’s really weird, the other programmer on the team wrote that and I thought it was super odd at first but I like it a lot.

SF – I imagine you could bend it round corners if you run fast enough with it.

BS – There are some definitely weird things you can do with that gun. As for the final gun, we’ve got the Zapper from the NES which shoots birds like from Duck Hunt. I just find that really amusing from a nostalgia standpoint.

SF – With Duck Hunt being in Smash Bros, I imagine younger players will now get the joke too.

BS – A stroke of luck for us then.

SF – How did the Devolver partnership come about by the way? Was it something that had been rumbling for a while or did it just come out of the blue?

BS – It’s a funny story actually. When we started the company, we’d been talking about publishers and with the type of stuff we want to make, Devolver would be our ideal publisher. They seemed to appreciate the same games that we do, the other devs have the same gameplay and design aesthetic too. We’d pretty much played every game they published, same with Vlambeer. Of course, we’d played Hotline Miami, I binged through that in a single night and we were just really in love with the stuff they were doing and they treated their devs really well so we said, if we can get Devolver, we are in.

We of course didn’t tell them that until we’d signed with them. So, we had the prototype of the game and we thought it was pretty solid. It was a week before E3 and I just said to Dave, let’s send you to E3 with the game. He said that it was going to cost a ton of money and we’ve only got a few days but I reckoned it would be worth it so we sent him out to show it to absolutely everyone. Something good was bound to come out of it so off Dave went to E3. He showed it to some Sony guys, Microsoft guys, all sorts of people but he heard that Devolver was out on the streets so he just walked up to the Devolver guys and just asked to show them the game. They weren’t really looking for games but he was tenacious and just stood there until they finally caved and looked at the game.

Again, the prototype was solid and after the show, they called us to talk and that was it really. We signed with them pretty quickly and we’ve been working on the game ever since. They’ve just been great about it.

SF – As an extension of that, any possible Hotline Miami or Broforce cameos in the Gungeon somewhere? A Hotline Miami mask passive maybe?

BS – *laughs* I haven’t actually talked to Free Lives or Dennation Games yet about doing something like that but I would absolutely love to. I very much doubt they’d say no, they are super nice guys. We’ve already got some references to Devolver games in there so I would say the answer is definitely.

SF – From the screens, the game seems perfect for sofa co-op. Is that a planned feature or is it too early to really say?

BS – It is definitely a planned feature. As anyone who has played, made or really knows the games making process, co-op is a big addition which changes a lot of stuff. To be totally blunt, it’s really hard. I personally don’t know anything about networking code but our other programmer does and he says we can probably do it, I think we can probably do it so it’s just a matter of time. We’ve got a lot of time as we are not targeting a release before summer of next year but I can’t promise anything, as if I do, I’ll feel really bad if we don’t get it in. However, I can’t say that we aren’t really trying to get it in, as it would be really damn awesome.

SF – So, it is being considered?

BS – I’d say stronger than that. It is definitely wanted and as long as nothing terrible happens, like we lose a month of time, it is definitely something we are working for. We’ll try to have it in day 1 and we’ll work as hard as it is such a cool feature.

SF – Any Early Access or is it just going to come out when it is done?

BS – Just going to come out when it is finished. When we started the company about a year ago, we talked about possibly doing a Kickstarter due to the success of it but then we signed with Devolver and we didn’t really need to in the end. It turned out to be pretty fortuitous as there seems to be quite a backlash to Kickstarter these day, which is a shame as good stuff has come out of Kickstarter but I understand why it has happened. Don’t blame the games really.

Since we didn’t do a Kickstarter, there was no real need to do Early Access, as we’ll just do some internal testing to try and fix all the bugs. We’re just going with old school launching the game and seeing what people think once the full thing is out.

SF – So, the target time for release is late summer 2015 then?

BS – I’d say probably mid-summer is the best guess. Again, we don’t want to release it until it is as perfect as it can be, because we are crazy and have limited resources so mid to late summer is a good estimate. I don’t think it will be anything past that, I don’t think it will be anything before that so mid-summer is the middle road really.

We’ll of course being taking it to shows and doing updates on our site so we aren’t going silent or anything, don’t worry.

SF – Well, those are all of my questions. Thank you so much for talking to me!

BS – No problem, great talking to you.

It was great to get so much information about this new indie shooter and await regular news on the game from the Gungeon official website. If you want to see the game in motion, check out the trailer below and expect more details in the new year.