one of the game's biggest influences, they also were influenced by Nuclear Throne, Spelunky, Dark Souls, and Metal Gear Solid. Dungeons in the game are generated in a procedural manner, but Dodge Roll found it was better to handcraft the individual rooms, playtesting those individually, and then using their random generation to connect these rooms into a dungeon. The designs of the guns took place over the two years of development, with most of the designs by team artist Joe Harty; several of the guns are inspired by other video games and video game systems, including the NES Zapper and guns similar to those appearing in games such as Mega Man, Metroid, Shadow Warrior, and Serious Sam. The boss character designs were made by a combination of ideas from Crooks and Harty, which were then presented to the gameplay programmer David Rubel to determine appropriate bullet hell patterns associated with that idea. The dodge roll mechanic was inspired by trying to include a similar mechanic of Ikaruga that enabled a player to easily dodge numerous bullets simultaneously, and took the ideas used in the Dark Souls series to have the character dodge out of the way from attacks. The team loved this mechanic and decided to name their studio after it. Similarly, they included usable environmental features such as flipping tables or bringing chandeliers down onto enemies to encourage the player to interact with and use the environment to their own advantage. At one point Dodge Roll had included an active reload feature, similar to Gears of War in which pressing a controller button at the right time during a reload would increase the damage the reloaded bullets would do, but instead decided to limit this to a power-up that can be collected, finding that players were already distracted enough by everything else going on in the game and that felt the moment of tension when the player had to wait for the gun to reload was critical to gameplay. Release In December 2014, at PlayStation Experience, the game was officially announced and followed by an announcement trailer. Throughout 2015, the game went to multiple conventions, including E3 2015, where, during the PC Gaming Show, the co-op feature of the game was revealed. On March 2, 2016, it was announced that the game would release on April 5, 2016. The game was set to receive free post-release content, such as