One indie rapper’s rise in gaming
When Dodge Roll studio founder Dave Crooks tells me he’s brought Adam Drucker onto the team to provide the music for upcoming dungeon crawling indie shooter Enter the Gungeon, it sounds like a meeting of minds. Enter the Gungeon is, after all, the result of a lot of weird career moves.
If you don’t recognise the name you might know Drucker better as rapper-poet DoseOne, a native son of Idaho who spent decades in the trenches of the midwest’s indie hip hop scene – a thing that does, apparently, exist. It’s only in recent years that he’s become active in armchair games development. His synth-hop tunes are already found in the soundtracks of games from Vlambeer and Double Fine Productions among others: Gang Beasts, Samurai Gunn, Gun Godz, Nuclear Throne.
“One of the reasons DoseOne appeals to me is that his work doesn’t sound immediately like ‘videogame’ music,” Crooks says. He had been a fan of the alternative rapper since high school, but met him in person when he performed the soundtrack of Samurai Gunn live. “In particular I don’t think it sounds like the music that is often associated with pixel art games,” he says. “We wanted atmosphere.”
Like Drucker, Crooks is a relatively new addition to indie gaming. The studio is made up of four former EA developers who are now working from an apartment in Washingon DC, on a game about guns that fire bees and stuff.
“The first thing about Gungeon that we were sure of was the name,” Crooks tells me. “I pitched the words ‘Enter the Gungeon’ to one of the other team members, and his response was ‘Yes. Let’s make that game,’ followed shortly by ‘what is it?’”
Enter the Gungeon is madness. This is a bullet-hell dungeon crawler where you can dodge-roll through bullets, a game with bosses like the Beholster: a Dungeons & Dragons baddie with a gun in each tentacle instead of an eye. It has guns that deal status effects like charm or poison and procedurally generated rooms that are described as a ‘constantly evolving bullet hell fortress’ by its makers.
According to Crooks, Dodge Roll began the project with a no holds barred philosophy: with the team now independent, no idea is ever off the table. “We wanted to throw every crazy idea we could come up with in it,” he says. As a result, this is a game where it isn’t out of place to find guns that fire black holes, bees, and sharks. It’s about getting as many guns as possible (Crooks says there are at least 130 weapons in the game) and shooting all of them.
It’s hugely inspired by the holy quadrilogy of indie games The Binding of Isaac, Spelunky, Wasteland Kings, and Smash TV. The studio’s biggest inspiration of all, however, is its namesake: dodge rolling.
“Everyone on the team is a massive Souls fan and one of the many things that we love about those games is the dodge-roll with i-frames,” says Crooks. (‘Invincibility frames’, for the uninitiated, are when your character is untouchable while rolling around.) “To me, those i-frames are one of the main reasons that those games, while often described as very difficult are also considered very fair. The opportunity to avoid (almost) all damage is always in your hands, so ideally you feel in control of your own destiny. So if and when you die, you place the blame on yourself.”
In Enter the Gungeon, each playable character has something from their life they want to undo, something only possible through the ultimate treasure of the Gungeon: a gun that can kill the past.
As you play, you’ll find items and weapons relating to specific characters and learn a little bit more about their motivation for challenging the Gungeon. The game is about absurdity and empowerment, says Crooks. You can hear it too. “One thing that I love about DoseOne’s work and something I hope we get to do more of on the soundtrack is bringing in vocals to add to the intensity,” he says. “Not many games do that but I think Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance did that to awesome effect – the whole soundtrack is power metal but as you are closing in on killing a boss, these wailing vocals come in and it feels absurdly exciting and empowering. Samurai Gunn and GunGodz do it very well too. So for us our ‘anthem’ has vocals but so do our bossfights, we think that adds some character and tension to the beat.”
But Enter the Gungeon is equally about fresh starts, says Crooks. It’s a love letter to the team’s new-found creative freedom on the outskirts of mainstream game making. “I like to say that Gungeon is something of catharsis after working at a major publisher,” he says. Emily Gera