The Game

Dark Lair is a Single Player bullet hell in which you are thrust into purgatory and must escape. With only a limited amount of time, you must survive for as long as possible to give yourself the best chance of fighting the overlord of the underworld, Lucifer, himself.


Gameplay
First Arena

You start off in a randomly generated room where you have to try and get the best weapon you can. Weapons are achieved through kills, so the more kills you get, the more weapons you'll get.However, time is important as you are only given around 3 minutes for both this room and the boss fight. Furthermore, taking damage reduces your time by 10 seconds, so it is key to leave the first arena by pressing enter as soon as you have a good weapon. alt text

The Boss

Once you have left the arena, you will take on Satan himself. With the time you have left and the gun you kept, you will have to take on him until you either win or the countdown hits 0. Good luck! alt text


Controls

Basic keyboard controls for the game

  1. Fullscreen: F3 (In Game)
  2. Movement: WASD
  3. Shoot: LMB
  4. Dodge: RMB
  5. Enter Boss Arena (Optional): Enter
Credits
  • Coding by Knyght and The Guy With The Snake
  • Art by Knyght and The Guy With The Snake
  • Music and Additional Art by Audiate
  • Font Used
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  • Kwis
    Lv. 67
    • Balance between sound effects and music is off. We can barely hear the music (since we shoot constantly)

    • Speaking of which, was it made with FLstudio? Reminds me of the default Slayer instrument. Sounds weird imo

    • Way too difficult to avoid shots. I mean, it doesn't really affect you much, but it feels unnecessary

    • Overall the arena is a bit too chaotic and the weapon buffs are so random

    • Avoid R for restarting in shooters! In shooters, we assume that R is for reloading, even if the game doesn't have it. That kind of conditional reflx, you know.

    • That said, it's a cool game. I like how the music slows down when you get hit!

    • It's nice to see a first phase were you stack up power while the second phase uses it (same kind of thing going on in my game now that i think about it, you stack up life for the second phase)

  • Fachewachewa
    Patron

    Too bad that there isn't any victory screen, that really felt weird. It's also unfortunate that you didn't have time to make any progression system for weapons, because I was really too random. In one game I spent 2 minutes trying to get a decent gun and only had shotguns, then the next one I got the super machine gun in 5 seconds and beat the boss pretty fast :D

    Good game overall though!

    Oh and the sounds are too loud. For reference I'm at 20% with windows' sound, I have a twitch stream open (gungeon, what a small world :D), full level, barely hear anything, yet your game was still a little too loud.

    Boyard
    Submitted

    Boyard

  • kbjwes77
    Lv. 19

    Love the Nuclear Throne inspiration, the audio warping when you get hit, and the overall polish of the game's mechanics.

    Enemy bullets were a little too fast and were hard to dodge because of this. Instructions, goals, and stats weren't very clear but I managed to get to the boss twice.

    Interesting take on the bullet-hell rogue-like genre. Could tell you guys put some real effort into this. I expect an even better game next time!

    Time's Up
    Submitted

    Time's Up

    • Audiate
      Lv. 2
      Audiate Musician of Dark Lair

      5yrs ago

      Thank you, kbjwes77 for giving us feedback! I agree, we definitely weren't clear enough with the instructions/goals for the games. Due to the time limitation and how much we were trying to accomplish, we simply ran out of time to add the extra clarifications about what the player should do.

      Also, thank you for the feedback about the enemy bullets. We'll definitely look into making those more manageable for the player if we continue to develop the game.

      Thank you once again for all the kind comments! We definitely enjoyed our first game jam here at GM48 and we hope to participate again soon!

      ( P.S. We accept your challenge to continue to improve for our next game jam! :D )

  • Jupiter Hadley
    Lv. 13

    Neat game! I included it in my GM48: Countdown compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/5_pXg7wyEyc

    • Audiate
      Lv. 2
      Audiate Musician of Dark Lair

      5yrs ago

      Thank you for playing, Jupiter! Great video and we hope you enjoyed the game! The message at the beginning that you missed was "Press Enter at any time to face Satan." Once you found a gun you were happy with, you could then try your hand at defeating the boss with the time remaining. Thank you once again!

  • Veralos
    Lv. 38

    Really cool game. I like how you have to build up power in the first phase before tackling the boss. Dodging attacks and shooting is a lot of fun, though some of the guns felt a bit lame (the pistol mainly). It's weird how the game instantly returns to the title when you beat the boss. Obviously that's just a game jam oversight kinda thing but the first couple of times I thought I had just died randomly.

    The presentation is overall fantastic. The sprites all look cool and I really like the glowing effect around the enemies and such. I also really enjoyed how the game counts your kills and time before facing the boss, plus the boss intro is pretty cool. The music also fits well and adds a lot to the game.

    • Knyght
      Lv. 2
      Knyght Coder of Dark Lair

      5yrs ago

      I'm glad to hear that you liked it! Unfortunately, as you could tell, we ran out of time and weren't able to make a boss death animation so we had to just send the player back to the main title. Some guns, especially like the pistol, were also supposed to get beefed up, but once again we had to ship the game as it was. If we do come back and work on the project again, these issues will definitely be taken care of.

  • Michael Hofmann
    Lv. 11

    I really like this one, it reminds me on nuclear throne and enter the gungeon!

    I think it would be better if the weapons have a progression and are not random!

    Rocket
    Submitted

    Rocket

    • Knyght
      Lv. 2
      Knyght Coder of Dark Lair

      5yrs ago

      Nuclear throne and Enter the Gungeon are some of my favorite games, so I'm pleased to hear someone even comparing our game to those two. With the weapons, making them progress was on the road map of planned features, but we had to cut it out as we sadly ran out of time. If work ever resumes on the project, that will most likely be one of the first things we fix.

  • var MP;
    Lv. 3

    Mannnnnn I really enjoyed this one. You can really feel the vlambeer influence and I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not, but I enjoyed it. The whole art department on this one was great.

    One thing is: please make the mechanics explicit! I didn't know I had to get the weapon so I just tried to survive until the timer ran out. Only when I got to the boss I realized it wasn't a good strategy. In fact, up until the timer run out, I thought I'd did good because the boss fight was only 5 seconds long. I thought I had to survive for five seconds total, which was easy.

    Good, good entry. Where can I follow development on this, if there's gonna be more?

    • Knyght
      Lv. 2
      Knyght Coder of Dark Lair

      5yrs ago

      Thank you so much for the wonderful feedback. We spent a lot of time trying to make the game feel good, so when it came to actually explaining the mechanics, we unfortunately had to hope that players could work it out themselves in the game. We should have done a better job actually explaining the mechanics both in the game and in the description, so we'll make sure to fix that for future jams. With future development, we haven't decided if we are gonna continue working on this yet. We might fix up the bugs and sort out all of the issues the game has, but that is still to be determined as we each have different responsibilities in life. If we do continue, I'll try to let you know where to follow the development.

  • RCDv57
    Lv. 2

    Great game!

    If you do any post Jam work on this, please remove the pistol.

    That way I don't have to ALT+F4 whenever I get it.

  • adrian09_01
    Lv. 4

    Fun game. I'm not great at bullet hell games, but the art is nicely done and the music is appropriate for the setting.

  • yokcos
    Lv. 7

    The music distorting when you get hit is so nice, but it seems that getting hit carries no penalty whatsoever that I noticed. The boss dies rather unceremoniously. The enemies, also kind of bland. and the bullets from them are rather too fast for how many of them there are. other than that, cool cool game.

    Tempbone
    Submitted

    Tempbone

    • Knyght
      Lv. 2
      Knyght Coder of Dark Lair

      5yrs ago

      Thank you for taking the time to leave your feedback. It probably was hard to notice since we didn't highlight it, but getting hit actually reduces the countdown by 10 seconds. With the boss, I also agree that he doesn't get the death he deserves, but we unfortunately ran out of time and had to make sure the base game was playable. Many tweaks are definitely needed, but I'm glad to see that you thought it was a cool game.

  • Pol L.
    Lv. 4

    Really cool. The game is fun, the assets are really well designed and all the graphic assets in general are well done. I love the character's animations. The game is hard but it makes him live longer. The boss is well designed and the music seems to come right from the hell :D Feeling of the weapons is good too. I loved your game.

    Run !
    Submitted

    Run !

  • Grey M.
    Lv. 3

    https://www.twitch.tv/videos/288043132 Timestamp 02:06:22

    Reviewed your game on stream!