HELL GENE

Reject your birthright. Escape destiny. Create chaos.

Play as the descendant of the Demon King as you reject your heritage, take up arms, and escape through the ever-changing rooms of Hell. The only way to escape: Defeat the Demon King. 

Along the way, you'll pick up temporary weapons to further annihilate your enemies, and gain the ability to permanently increase your own strength... at the cost of making your escape more chaotic.

CONTROLS:

WASD - Move

Mouse - Aim

Left Click - Melee Attack

Right Click - Ranged Attack

Left Shift - Dash

Created for the Brackeys Community Jam 2021 2

Download

Download
Hell-Gene-windows.zip 32 MB
Download
Hell-Gene-mac.zip 41 MB

Install instructions

Windows:

Download Hell-Gene-windows.zip

Extract folder

Play Hell-Gene.exe

Mac:

Download Hell-Gene-mac.zip

Extract folder

Play Hell-Gene-mac.app

Comments

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This is a good roguelike, not great since it's a bit unfinished (of course), but pretty enjoyable.

Here's a list of positives, negatives, and in-betweens.

Good:

- The gunplay is legitimately fun. One of my favorite guns in-game is the one that shoots out explosives as it deals great AoE damage.

- I like the music, good job Kwiper :) I know it borrows a lot of chord progressions, but that doesn't make it bad, I actually found that element kinda charming.

- The "retain/raise" concept is good, it adds more challenge and decision making, and makes sure the game isn't static in difficulty.

Bad:
- The way enemies just pop into existence is frustrating. You take a lot of damage that doesn't seem fair since an enemy spawns on top of you or close to you. Enemies should spawn when you enter a new room.

- Melee is awful to use and a waste of time, you'll probably take more damage than necessary trying to kill something with melee, and there's no point to using it because guns are better and are common drops. Also it's just not very fun.

- You can run past enemies in a lot of situations, which makes rooms where there are dead-ends or stairs not as challenging.

Mixed:

- I'd prefer if the music was a bit more dynamic, akin to that of Gungeon, where a track will go from calm to aggressive if there are active enemies, making the music a bit more impactful, but that's just my opinion.

- The art is well done, but there are a few issues with how it tiles in-game. The coloring also doesn't seem to match up very well with the UI graphics.

- Don't make me go through the "How to Play" every time I die.

Overall well done, I enjoyed it!

I liked the different ranged weapons, whereas I have no clue how the different melee weapons differ.

Enemy design could use some improvements in general with their attacks, and the boss fight could be more interesting with perhaps some enemy spawns to be able to get new weapons during the fight. At this time I could just run circles around the boss and damage him slowly with the default pistol.

(+1)

Hey, thanks!

Yeah, a lot of the issues you mentioned just had to do with a lack of time for the game jam. Melee weapons were supposed to have more unique properties outside of damage boosts, but unlike the ranged weapons where it was largely just changing the projectile type, we would've had to change how the melee attacks worked. Same with the boss. If we were to ever revisit this in the future, these are definitely all things we'll take into consideration for improvement.

Thanks for playing!

Amazing Game!