Learning how to do things more efficiently in general was the result of the shift to side-scroll view, but the real challenge was gravity, something that most bullet hell games don’t have. It is the only reason Exit can run on a phone, and why Enter likely never will.” "But the reality is that at the speed these projectiles travel, having a circle collider in the center provides nearly the exact same user experience with drastically less CPU demand. In Enter the Gungeon the hit detection was pixel perfect, though many projectiles had custom offsets, which we thought was necessary to make anything that looked like it hit actually hit. “For this to work, we took another page from bullet hell games, reducing the hitboxes of the players and the enemy bullets to allow for more overlap before a hit is detected. “ Exit the Gungeon presents a more confined play space in the elevators, and the boss encounters have faster, more dense bullet patterns,” he continues. Exit the Gungeon is different in this regard, finding a new foundation to build upon thanks to its 2D perspective, along with several design tweaks. This touchstone arrived later in development, as the first playable version was made by Jaewon Yoo from Singlecore Games, who then continued to co-develop the game with the team.Ĭrooks says Enter the Gungeon always carried the bullet hell DNA, but the top-down perspective, along with the traversal and collision systems never fully showcased the signature projectile claustrophobia of games like Ikaruga or the Touhou series. It later incorporated more and more features from Gungeon, becoming a more ‘traditional’ bullet hell game, and Downwell was a touchstone for us in terms of level flow and game speed,” he says. “It started closer to a hybrid between Super Crate Box and shoot ‘em ups like The Raiden Project than Enter the Gungeon. Games like Downwell and Shovel Knight Dig immediately come to mind as a point of comparison at first glance, but as game designer Dave Crooks tells Gamasutra, there’s a mix of both retro and modern influences at Exit the Gungeon's core. It has a 2D perspective, weapons are randomly switched after a matter of seconds, and dodging can now be done in all four directions. While it certainly remains familiar to veterans of the series, Exit the Gungeon is quite different. Players have to command the original crew of characters and escape from the crumbling dungeon, making use of elevators while shooting everything in sight and dodging dozens of projectiles at once. Now, along with a physical arcade cabinet for Enter the Gungeon: House of the Gundead that is currently in co-development with Griffin Aerotech, Exit the Gungeon is the latest version of the series, introducing itself as a spin-off dungeon climber.