Hell Can Wait is a diabolic action-roguelike that combines the furious, fast-paced combat of a bullet-hell shooter with the deep strategy of a deck-building card game.

In this demo, you'll fight across 6 stages of procedurally generated enemy waves and face enemies including:

I'm glad you asked!

It's a really early version of the combat for the game. At this stage it's set up as an auto-scrolling shooter where you'll face waves of enemies and bosses while unlocking new cards to use against them.

After every stage you'll be able to choose from a selection of 3 cards to add to your deck for the remainder of that run. A successful run should take you 15-20 minutes at most.

It's a very early build, so there's a lot of placeholder stuff. Particularly with the art you might notice:

• A flying security drone (left over from the game's original prototype as a Cyberpunk themed shooter)
  
• A weird blue alien/demon tadpole (because I couldn't think of a cool enemy that would fire in circles)
  
• ALL THE BACKGROUNDS (because it's not going to stay as an auto-scroller forver)

Oh yeah, and the title screen and logo are totally work-in-progress, sorry ːsteamfacepalmː


I'm prototyping various stage/level layouts at the moment. I want to keep the wide open spaces for a lot of the combat, so that you can have that feeling of being overwhelmed if you don't control the crowd to an extent.

BUT I also want some of that sweet sweet exploration and it'd be great to have environmental hazards in there and start work on making the levels look as nice as the sprites. I'm erring towards something a bit like a side-scrolling Enter The Gungeon, or maybe more like a Dead Cells thing, but with specific combat rooms placed throughout the stage that will give the card reward screen when you clear the room (it'll still be multi-wave attacks, but likely fewer).

I'm open to your thoughts after you've played the demo :)


Yeah, sorry, they do nothing in the demo. They're the bullets from enemies that you kill and will be used as currency when I get shops working in the game!


There's 18 cards right now (if you're checking this at the start of the festival).

I'm adding another 9 in over the course of the Festival (starting Thursday, it's my kid's 3rd birthday on Wednesday so...) - so keep checking back every day and posting new high scores for me to beat!!


So, I wasn't planning on doing anything. Simply because this game isn't really announced as such or anything, so I'd be surprised if many people have heard of it.

If you are interested in a stream or in chatting to me about the game, then be sure to let me know here in the comments and I'll try and schedule something in around parenting and prototyping!


Sure!


No.

Go play the game!