Hello and welcome everybody to the first developer log for Devilated, the bloody and bombastic boomer-shooter by Trunka and Neon Doctrine. This short series aims to provide a peak behind the scenes of Devilated’s development, showing off how the game evolved throughout early access. Now without further ado, let’s talk about making cool shit.

Endless meetings with Trunka about the current state of Devilated resulted in pretty much the same statement from our developer every time: “I just want to do cool shit.” A noble goal to be sure, one we should strive for in every facet of our lives even, though unfortunately not something we could present to the bosses of Neon Doctrine as our deliverables while expecting to keep our jobs.

Faced with the challenge of explaining the idea of cool shit to a lack of imagination, Trunka worked closely with Neon Doctrine’s Paolo and Steve to nail down exactly what cool shit looked like, and the results were fairly predictable: skateboards, bullet time, magic swords, one-liners spoken by the irreplaceable Gianni Matragrano, guitar solos atop a mountain of demonic corpses, the usual things you’d expect…

…But it was also a lot of math. Simple math sure, but a lot of it, enough to make us check under our work desks in case our elementary school teachers were hiding under there.

That math was the nitty-gritty numbers, the ammo counts and damage-per-bullet and TTK (time to kill) in seconds that could make even the most radical weapons in existence feel as exciting as mahjong with the aunties should the numbers be wrong. Someone needed to go through all our weapons and write down the exact numbers behind each one. Someone needed to record footage of what each weapon currently looked like, so the notes behind the math could be accompanied by the weapon’s current sound and visual design. Someone needed to give an overall summary of how closely the experience of playing with the weapons matched up to the grand ideal of doing cool shit.

And just like with any group task, all three of those Someones ended up being one someone: Steve.

Above is a screenshot of our internal developer notes for Devilated. Poor Steve made detailed entries for each and every one of Devilated’s 100+ weapons, even creating his own personal star rating system for each stat, and topped off each entry with suggestions for giving a weapon just a little more oomph, with Trunka and Paolo chiming in with their own thoughts in the entry’s comments section.

This detailed work influenced Devilated’s development in two different ways. Not only did each weapon get the attention it deserved in order to flourish (for example, the notes on the Taipan feeling samey led to discussing the creation of special ammo), but it also allowed Trunka to observe trends within the bigger picture, such as weapon accuracy being overall terrible, that led to significant reworks for the game.

Now did the head honchos of Neon Doctrine understand all this work? Were we able to get the ideals of Cool Shit through to them? Honestly, we’re not sure, but the positive reviews we were getting from our amazing Early Access community did go a long way towards convincing them that we were doing actual work, so you have our deepest thanks for keeping us employed.

We hope you enjoyed this sneak peek into Devilated’s development. If pulverizing demon hordes then shoving them down your throat perks your interest, do give us a wishlist on Steam here! Devilated releases on PC on October 2024!