This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 19, September 2025

Kill, loot, boss, repeat, return.

This is the gameplay loop of CARNiVORY, an upcoming roguelite shooter from Chicago-based studio Chowdahound.

Like many other roguelikes and bullet hell titles, CARNiVORY was developed to be ultra-gory, with a high skill ceiling and plenty of enjoyable illustrated carnage. Fans of ridiculous, violent flash animations and games from the Newgrounds-era will feel right at home here.

One of its programmers, Karen Spriggs, described the game as “a nasty, heinous, and quick bullet hell shooter with a cast of deranged characters and an array of oversized guns.”

Beginning work in April, the four-person team produced all the art assets in Procreate and the code in Godot using GDScript. Spriggs said that the pre-CIGS crunch was the hardest part of development thus far, but that they don’t plan to have such rigid deadlines in the future.

“Our strong work ethic and dedication to the game has been our greatest asset,” she said. “It helps to counterbalance the limited amount of time we have each day.”

The team certainly is dedicated, working on the game every day as a hobby, though they would love to make it work full time should they find success.

Besides that daily schedule, Spriggs also highly recommends practices from the Scrum framework such as epics and sprints, which break development into smaller, more manageable parts.

Outside of CARNiVORY, Chowdahound is looking back to look forward. Their upcoming project is based on a “ninja action game” prototype called STEEL LOTUS they made for a Playtest Planet event at Night City. It will be set in the same world but have a completely new story.

“The original prototype’s full scope was too vast to develop for us at the time,” Spriggs said. “We’re going to return to it in the future with more experience and resources. To those that played and enjoyed it, we know you’ll like what we will be cooking.”

Overall, the team is focused on having fun and producing projects they can get excited about making.

“We treat development like it’s a normal job, but also never take it too seriously or get crazy about deadlines,” Spriggs said. “It won’t always be enjoyable to develop games, but it should be at least, like 50% of the time.”

Wishlist CARNiVORY on Steam at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3779300/CARNiVORY/