Trivia / Devil Engine

• Channel Hop: The game was originally published by Dangen Entertainment and developed by Protoculture Games. However, due to controversies surrounding Dangen, including mistreatment of Protoculture Games's staff, the latter party cut ties with the former and now self-publish the digital editions of the game, with Poppy Works and Beep in charge of distributing the limited-print physical editions.
• Cross-Generation Video Game: Devil Engine Ignition was only going to be released on PC, Switch, and PS4. However, the game got delayed long enough that it will be released not only on PS4, but PS5 as well.
• Digital Piracy Is Okay: Due to the Dangen controversy, Sinoc, the director and lead developer of the game, temporarily encouraged fans to pirate the game instead of buying it until the matter was resolved.
• Executive Meddling:
  • According to the developers, Sony's relatively obtuse process for third-party developers (particularly compared to Valve's and Nintendo's) is why the PS4 version was not released simultaneously with the other two consumer versions. Eventually, the developers changed course by planning to have Devil Engine Ignition be the launch version of the PS4 port, however this was put on hold for several years because...
  • The game's rights being seized by Dangen caused the Ignition update to be delayed by at least a year. It then got delayed by a few more years for reasons not related to this trope.
  • Originally, the game was not going to have an easy difficulty, but the developers relented when Dangen staff complained that the game was too hard.
• God Does Not Own This World:
  • Shortly before Devil Engine Ignition was to be released, Dangen Entertainment took rights to the game away from Protoculture Games, preventing them from releasing Ignition. Protoculture also was not getting any money from the game's sales.
  • Once rights reverted back to Protoculture, another issue popped up: Only Sinoc, the lead developer was getting any money from sales of the game, with the artistic side of the staff (artist Thomas Bailey and composer Joseph Bailey) still not receiving any of the revenue. The Baileys also revealed that Devil Engine is being sold without their consent. When Devil Engine: Complete Edition, which will include the long-delayed Ignition version of the game, was announced, Joseph confirmed that this version of the game was not produced with his or his brother's permission either.
• Screwed by the Network: Ignition has been delayed indefinitely due to some messy issues that led the development team to losing rights to the game. The TL;DR of it is that there's a lot of beef between Protoculture (the lead developer, especially) and Dangen, a lot of abuse allegations against Dangen CEO Ben Judd, and the development team is not being paid by Dangen, something that the development team got even more upset about when it was revealed that Dangen would be in charge of the Kickstarter for The Wonderful 101 Remastered. (The developers of Fight Knight have similar issues as well.) However as of January 2021, Protoculture and Dangen have agreed on terms for severing their partnership and the rights reverted to Protoculture.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The development team has said that Ignition was completed in September 2019, and was supposed to be released in winter of 2019 (i.e. December 2019). Unfortunately, with Dangen taking the rights to the game away from Protoculture, this ended up being delayed by over a year. The PS4 version ended up getting delayed even further as development on that version had stalled in the meantime and the developer needed to change to a newer version of the development SDK to get through Sony's approval process. Additional delays occured after the rights to the game reverted to Protoculture Games as a result of the legal issues between Sinoc and the Bailey brothers, the latter group of which worked on the game's art and soundtrack assets and who took legal action for not being paid for their work. Ignition is finally set for an November 9, 2023 release, almost four years after its original intended release date.
• Throw It In!: The Stage 5 parallax swivel effect was originally a bug, then the dev team decided it was cool and refined it.
• Troubled Production: Immediately after Protoculture released the statement declaring their peaceful termination of their partnership with Dangen in January 2021, the offical account put out a subsequent statement indicating that the developer does not have the rights to the art or soundtrack assets and that the artist and composer are not being paid.
• What Could Have Been:
  • An arcade version of the game on the exA-Arcadia platform was in the works, but was cancelled.
  • Bomb was going to be called something else, but the developers decided "Bomb" was a Boring, but Practical name and stuck with it, despite not behaving the same way that other shmups' Smart Bombs do.
  • ec2151 was the original music composer for the game, and produced a partial soundtrack but then parted ways with the rest of the team, resulting in his music being replaced with Joseph Bailey's. However, he then published this "prototype" soundtrack on his Bandcamp profile here.

---