The roguelike bullet hell Enter the Gungeon was quite good when it came out in 2016 and got better this summer with the big Advanced Gungeons & Draguns update, which enabled Shaun to suck less at it. As it turns out, that will be the final expansion for the game: Developer Dodge Roll said in a lengthy update on Reddit that after five years of working on the game, it's ready to move on to something else.
"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," the studio wrote. "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."
Because of that, and a desire to put their hard-won experience to work on something new, the developers have hit the brakes on plans for a new paid expansion for Enter the Gungeon. Instead, they'll release a smaller update that will be both free and final: It will fix some longstanding bugs and add about 20 new guns plus some new items and synergies, a new character with random starting equipment, and "a handful of other small features" that will presumably be revealed later.
But the final update may not be the final word on the game: "Further down the line, there will also likely be some other Gungeon news, but we can’t go into detail yet," the studio wrote. "We are doing some experiments that hopefully you will enjoy."
As for the next project, it's "a more ambitious idea than Gungeon," but it's also "at an incredibly, incredibly early stage" and so Dodge Roll isn't revealing any specifics about it just yet. It did say that the foundations will be "more robust" than Enter the Gungeon, which will enable elements and ideas that aren't possible in that game.
"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," it wrote. "That’s about all I can say for now, but please know that we are excited, and we hope you will be too."
